western Africa

western Africa, region of the western African continent comprising the countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Western Africa is a term used in the Encyclopædia Britannica to designate a geographic region within the continent of Africa. The term West Africa is also often used to refer to this part of the continent. As conventionally understood, however, West Africa is primarily a political and economic designation and comprises all the areas considered here except Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and the Saharan parts of Mali, Mauritania, and Niger.

The region may be divided into several broad physiographic regions. The northern portion of western Africa is composed of a broad band of semiarid terrain, called the western Sudan, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the area of Lake Chad on the east, a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km). It is largely a plateau of modest elevation and borders the Sahara (desert) on the north and the Guinea Coast forests on the south. Rainfall in this region ranges from less than 10 inches (250 mm) in its arid northern reaches to about 50 inches (1,250 mm) in the south. The flora of the western Sudan consists of the scrub vegetation of the transitional zone known as the Sahel in the north and a mix of tall trees and high savanna grasslands in the south. Lying south of the western Sudan are the Guinea Coast equatorial forests, which flourish along the Atlantic coast and extend inland for about 100 to 150 miles (160 to 240 km).

Most of the Sahara and the transitional vegetational zones to its south (the Sahel and the western Sudan) are drained, where there is enough rainfall to support surface streams, either southward via the Niger River system or inland to the Lake Chad basin in the east. Along the better-watered Atlantic coastal areas, the chief features are (west to east) the Mauritanian-Senegal Basin, drained by the Sénégal River; the Fouta Djallon and Guinea Highlands; the Volta River and Niger River coastal plains; and the uplands of Nigeria’s Jos Plateau and the Cameroon Highlands.

Culturally, the people of the region belong for the most part to one of three major language families. In the northern and least-populous Saharan regions, Arabs and Imazighen (Berbers; singular Amazigh) of the Afro-Asiatic language family predominate. South of a line connecting the course of the Sénégal River, the Niger River, and the southern two-thirds of Nigeria, Niger-Congo languages are spoken. Along the middle course of the Niger River and around Lake Chad, Nilo-Saharan languages related to those of peoples farther east predominate. These peoples are divided into a very complex ethnic and tribal mosaic but may often be conveniently classified by their individual languages.

Muslims in western Africa

A reasonable body of sources for the writing of western African history begins to be available about 1000 ce. Three centuries earlier the Arabs had completed their conquest of Africa north of the Sahara and so came into possession of the northern termini of trade routes reaching across the desert to western Africa. The lively school of geographers and historians that flourished in the Muslim world from about the 9th to the 14th century thus secured access to growing amounts of information about what they called the bilād al-sūdān, the territory of the black peoples south of the Sahara.

This information has its limitations. The Muslim writers, contemptuous of non-Islamic societies, passed on little of what they must have known about the organization of pagan black societies and tended to concentrate on and condemn what struck them as their more monstrous aberrations. Conversely, they doubtless exaggerated the importance of the Islamization that entered western Africa with the Muslim traders crossing the Sahara. The earliest firsthand account of western Africa is probably that of the world traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, who visited the western Sudan in 1352–53. Finally, the North African merchants did not penetrate into western Africa beyond the urban centres of trade and government that existed or came to develop on the northern fringes of the cultivable savannas fronting the Sahara. Their bilād al-sūdān was in fact only the northern marches.

Nevertheless, the picture of western Africa given in the early Muslim writings is of major interest. It is apparent that, right from the beginnings of Arab contact, the organization of the more northerly western African peoples was not solely tribal. They had considerable towns and cities that were supported by a developed agriculture. They had organized networks of markets and trade and a developed system of monarchical government. Kings, whose claim to power was based on descent from the mythical divine founding ancestors of their ethnic groups, taxed trade and levied tribute on the agricultural villages through their possession of bodies of retainers who provided them both with military force and with a hierarchy of officials.

It seems likely that there was an increase in the volume of trans-Saharan trade following the organization of North Africa under Muslim dynasties and that this growth of international trade with western Africa stimulated the growth there of internal trade, urbanization, and monarchical government. Certainly the control of trade, towns, and government in western Africa became increasingly Islamic in form. But it is quite clear that the foundations for the economic and political development of the western Sudan were in existence before the time of contact with Muslim traders or authors. Early Muslim interest was concentrated on two major western African kingdoms: Kanem, in the east, north of Lake Chad; and Ghana, in the extreme west, on the borders of modern Mauritania and Mali. The Muslim sources, which are broadly confirmed by local tradition, indicate that the kingdom of Kanem was being formed during the 9th and 10th centuries through an interaction between Saharan nomads and agricultural village communities. But ancient Ghana (not to be confused with its modern namesake, considerably farther to the south and east) had already reached levels of organization that presuppose several centuries of continuing development.

The earliest extant Arabic reference to a kingdom of Ghana dates from the early 9th century. In the middle of the 11th century, the Córdoban geographer Abū Uʿbayd al-Bakrī described its capital, court, and trade in some detail. The capital was made up of two towns, a stone-built town inhabited by the Muslim traders and a mud-built one of the local Mande in which the king had his walled palace. Their centres were six miles apart, and the whole of the intervening country was more or less built up. The considerable population was supported by the produce of surrounding farms, which were watered from wells. The court displayed many signs of wealth and power, and the king had under him a considerable number of satellite rulers. A principal part of his revenue was derived from regular taxes on trade. The mainstay of this trade was the exchange of gold, which Ghana’s own merchants brought from lands to the south, for salt, which the northern traders brought in from salt deposits in the Sahara.

Al-Bakrī’s description is broadly confirmed by archaeology. The region in which ancient Ghana was situated contains the ruins of a considerable number of stone-built towns that must have been supported by extensive agricultural and commercial activity; those at Koumbi Saleh are generally identified with the capital described by al-Bakrī.

The relatively extensive Muslim interest in Ghana was undoubtedly due to its importance as a source of gold. Kanem seems to have been less important commercially; the main interest of the Muslim authors seems to have been in the quasi-divine status of its kings, which offended their Muslim principles. Other western African kingdoms undoubtedly existed at this time, but the Muslim sources record little of them beyond their names and approximate locations. Thus between Ghana and Kanem was Kawkaw, perhaps the nucleus of the later Songhai kingdom of Gao. Malel, to the south of Ghana, may similarly have been a prototype of the later Mande kingdom of Mali, which ultimately was to eclipse and absorb Ghana itself.

There are perhaps three possible—and not mutually exclusive—explanations for the origins and development of the kingdoms that Arab trade and scholarship had revealed by about 1000 ce. The first is that they were the result of the invasion of agricultural territory by pastoralists from the Sahara who belonged to the Libyan Amazigh tribes who spoke a non-Semitic language and were the dominant stock of North Africa before its conquest by the Arabs.

This is the explanation often given in western Sudanese traditions and chronicles. From roughly the 15th century onward, many of these were preserved by local authors who wrote in Arabic and were Muslims, and who thus had some incentive to link the history of their peoples with that of North Africa and with the adjacent Middle East. It was also the explanation favoured by European historians of the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries when Europeans were themselves conquering and colonizing black Africa. There thus evolved the so-called “Hamitic hypothesis,” by which it was generally supposed that any progress and development among agricultural blacks was the result of conquest or infiltration by pastoralists from northern or northeastern Africa. Specifically, it was supposed that many of the ideas and institutions of tribal monarchy had spread through Africa by diffusion from the ancient civilization of Egypt and the Nile valley.

There can be no doubt that over the centuries pastoralists from the Sahara have indeed advanced and conquered southward. But not all of these were Libyan Imazighen; some, such as the dynasts of Kanem, were black African in language and culture. Nor is it easy to understand how mobile desert pastoral tribes could be effective transmitters of ideas and institutions from the settled civilization of the Nile valley to other agricultural lands in western Africa. It would seem more probable that conquering pastoralists who did succeed in establishing new kingdoms and dynasties in western Africa should do so by taking over existing monarchies, perhaps city-states or even “village-states,” and amalgamating these into larger units. Some early western African traditions can certainly be interpreted in this sense.

This leads to the second explanation for the origins and development of monarchical statehood among the western African tribes. There is archaeological evidence for the evolution of a cattle-herding and agricultural economy among a mixed population of Libyan Imazighen and black agricultural peoples (now called Ḥarāṭīn) in the Sahara by at least 4000 bce—i.e., more or less contemporary with similar developments in the Nile valley. The desiccation of the Sahara and the evolution of its present desert between about 8000 and 2000 bce must have occasioned an outflowing of population in which the blacks concentrated in the savannas to the south of it. There, in favourable riverine or lacustrine environments, it seems reasonable to suppose that the same desire to avoid conflicts over land and water rights and to control and exploit agricultural surpluses, which had led in the exceptionally fertile but extremely constricted environment of the Nile valley to the dramatic kingship and civilization of the pharaohs, should have occasioned the evolution of similar if less spectacular monarchies.

It should be noted, however, that the major western African monarchies known to the Arabs by approximately 1000 ce were situated not in the well-watered lands along the Sénégal and Niger valleys nor around Lake Chad but north of these, in the less favoured agricultural territory between them and the southern edges of the Sahara. This suggests that a third factor in the evolution of these northern monarchies was the influence of long-distance trade. The western African kingdoms had their own resources of iron, which in some cases were being worked by about 500 bce, but they imported other metals, notably copper, together with horses, luxury manufactures, and—above all—salt, a vital commodity that was scarce in all of western Africa except the coastlands. In exchange they could offer gold, ivory, certain agricultural commodities, and slaves.

The exchange across the Sahara of such commodities probably goes back to times before the establishment of the modern desert. The emergence of the desert did not lead to the cessation of the trade but meant that its surviving pastoralists were encouraged to organize regular trans-Saharan expeditions for trade and plunder. It is known from Herodotus and other classical authors and from surviving rock engravings in the desert that horse-drawn chariots were in use in the Sahara by about 500 bce. Chariots would have been used for short raids rather than for trans-Saharan trade. But the fact that the engravings are deployed along two principal lines, from the Fezzan and southern Morocco toward the upper Niger and Sénégal rivers, suggests a North African interest in the alluvial gold of these rivers. This could well have occasioned the 6th-century Carthaginian expedition led by Hanno to explore the possibility of direct sea trade with western Africa along the Atlantic coast. Despite this expedition, the Carthaginians do not seem to have been capable of opening up a regular sea trade with western Africa. The links with western Africa remained firmly in the hands of the Saharan tribes, although, at about the beginning of the Common Era, camels and other pack animals came into use to supplant the horse-drawn vehicles.

The profits to be obtained by distributing Saharan and Mediterranean produce in western Africa, and by controlling the collection and export of the western African commodities that were exchanged for them, must have been a powerful factor in encouraging the kings of communities on the southern fringes of the Sahara to extend their rule by conquest over adjacent similar communities. Control over more extensive territories meant that by tribute and taxation they could acquire greater stocks of goods for exchange with North Africa and the Sahara and more clients and slaves to extend their power at the expense of their neighbours. Some of their increased human power could be mounted on horses, obtained from the Saharan trade, to increase the mobility and power of their armed forces over the open savannas. It is tolerably certain that the power of the kings of ancient Ghana, controlling the export of gold from the Sénégal and Niger valleys, was built up in this way.

The states of the Sudan

The early kingdoms and empires of the western Sudan

In the 10th century the kings of Ghana extended their sway over the Ṣanhājah, the congeries of Amazigh nomadic tribes living around Audaghost, just north of their kingdom, who supplied them with salt and North African goods (seePrincipal kingdoms and peoples of western Africa, 11th–16th century.From J. Fage, An Atlas of African History; Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.).

This move must have upset the economic balance between agricultural Ghana and the pastoral Ṣanhājah, and ultimately it provoked a reaction. Like the North African Imazighen, the Ṣanhājah tribes were already to some extent Islamized, and they shortly found in a militant, puritanical version of Islam the means to eliminate their tribal differences and to unite in the movement known to history as the Almoravids. In the middle of the 11th century they began to expand into the productive lands on either side of the western Sahara, and it would seem that later in the century Ghana became dominated by them.

One important result of this domination, following as it did upon some centuries of trading contact by Muslims, was that the ruling and merchant classes of the western Sudan became converted to Islam—though in the case of the rulers the conversion was for many centuries not wholehearted. The justification for a king’s claim to enforce his rule over his subjects, who remained pagan, was his descent from the original ancestor who had first settled the land and, by accommodation with its deities and spirits, had developed and controlled it for agriculture. If he were not to be rejected and replaced as king by a rival member of its royal family, he had to continue to observe the ancestral and land cult rites in which he was the principal figure.

However, the depredations of the Almoravids’ herds and their internecine quarrels must have undermined the prosperity of agriculture in a marginal environment and would have accelerated the decay of Ghana. More southerly Mande groups, many of which had formed satellite kingdoms of the Ghana empire, began to act independently and to compete among themselves for primacy. Eventually about 1235, in the time of a king called Sundiata, the Keita kings of Mali, in the well-watered and gold-bearing lands of the uppermost Niger valley, gained ascendancy and incorporated what was left of ancient Ghana into their own considerably more extensive empire.

The Keita clan seem originally to have been traders from lower down the Niger, and the strategy of their empire was to extend their power down river to the Niger Bend and to its trading cities of Timbuktu and Gao, which lay at the foot of the shortest trans-Saharan routes. The initial success of the Almoravids and their subsequent rapid decline had upset the stability of the more westerly caravan roads leading to Ghana, while by the 13th century Ifrīqīyah (Tunisia and eastern Algeria) and Egypt provided more stable bases for trans-Saharan trade than did Morocco. The Niger River provided a natural means of communication from Mali and its goldfields to Timbuktu and to Gao and also provided Mali’s merchants with the possibility of opening up trade elsewhere in black western Africa. By the 14th century, Mande merchants, the Dyula, were trading as far east as the city-states of the Hausa, between Lake Chad and the Niger. By about the same time they had also begun to develop a new trade route southeastward from Jenne (modern Djenné, Mali), on a southerly tributary of the Niger, toward goldfields that were being opened up along the Black Volta and further south still, in what is now modern Ghana.

These Mande merchants were Muslims, and their activities led to a considerable expansion of Islam among the trading classes of western Africa and, with the qualification mentioned earlier, also among its kings. Thus the first conversions of Hausa monarchs seem to date from the 14th or 15th centuries. The Mali kings themselves valued Islam for the commercial and diplomatic advantages it gave them, and some of them, of whom the best known is Mansa Mūsā (1307–32), made notable pilgrimages to Mecca via Egypt. As may be seen from Ibn Baṭṭuṭah’s account of his travels in 1352–53, the essentially pagan society of the western Sudan became open to a considerable degree of Islamic influence, and literacy and even scholarship became firmly established in its major cities.

The success of the Mali empire depended, however, on its rulers maintaining firm control of the Niger waterway. This in its turn depended on their maintaining control over a non-Mande people, the Songhai, who monopolized the fishing and canoe transport of the middle Niger. The Songhai had an independent monarchical tradition of their own, and Mande control of their capital, Gao, proved somewhat fitful. During the 15th century it was lost altogether, and eventually a Songhai king arose, Sonni ʿAlī (1464–92), who, appealing to traditional Songhai paganism against the Islamic universalism of the Mande system, destroyed the Mali empire by ceaseless military campaigning and erected in its place a new empire ruled from Gao. But if this empire were to be profitable and strong, the Songhai needed the Mande as much as the Mande had needed the Songhai. After Sonni ʿAlī’s death, power passed to one of his former generals, al-Hājj Muḥammad Askia (1493–1528), who was both a Mande and a Muslim, and thereafter there was a continual struggle for power between the two groups.

The Songhai empire was never strong in the west, where a number of Mande kingdoms remained in the tradition of Ghana and Mali, but was more effective to the east. There the kingdom of Kanem, whose kings had become Islamized in the 11th century, had declined during the 14th and 15th centuries following quarrels among its aristocracy when it was subject to pressure from new nomad invasions. Eventually, however, the Kanem kings reestablished their state in the former province of Bornu in the southwest, close by the Hausa kingdoms. But in the 16th century, Songhai was the most important external influence over the latter, which began to grow in power and importance. South of the Niger Bend the kingdoms of the Mossi-Dagomba peoples were emerging, founded by bands of cavaliers who may have been in some way connected with the ruling families to the northeast.

Songhai was strong enough to extend its sway northward across the Sahara to as far as the salt mines of Taghaza, close to the Moroccan borders. This upset the balance of trans-Saharan trade, as Ghana’s attempt to control the Ṣanhājah had done, and in 1591 finally provoked effective retaliation from the Saʿdī dynasty of Morocco. An expeditionary force of some 4,000 soldiers was sent across the Sahara and took the important cities of Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne. The Moroccans had firearms, but their success against the much larger numbers of the Songhai army was also facilitated by the internal divisions of the Songhai state. For a time the profits of this enterprise were considerable, but the Moroccans were not strong enough to control the network of trade routes within western Africa that brought gold and other produce to the Niger cities. Ultimately the main gainers from their conquest were the Saharan tribes, essentially Amazigh in origin (such as the Tuareg) but now increasingly Muslim and even Arabized, who finally levied tribute on the descendants of the Moroccan soldiers who formed the military caste (Arma) of Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne.

Firearms also came to the central Sudan about the same time through the trading relations that existed between Bornu and the Ottoman Turks in North Africa. Together with Muslim cavalry, they enabled Idris Alawma of Bornu (end of 16th century) to impose a Muslim bureaucracy on his pagan subjects and to reconquer Kanem. This revival of the Kanem-Bornu dynasty, however, was relatively short-lived. By the 18th century it was the much smaller Hausa kingdoms, especially Kano and Katsina—which had learned much from Mande commercial and industrial experience and had developed a trading network to the south to rival that of the Mande themselves—that took the leading role in western Africa’s external trade with North Africa across the Sahara.

The wider influence of the Sudanic kingdoms

The development of such major Sudanic kingdoms and empires as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, the Hausa states, and Kanem-Bornu along the southern fringes of the Sahara had a number of important consequences for the history of western Africa as a whole. For example, it provided the background for the expansion of the Fulani, the only pastoral western African people (also variously known as Fulbe, Fula, Fellata, and Peul).

The fact that, uniquely in western Africa, the Fulani are pastoralists has led to suggestions that they were originally a Saharan people. The Fulani language, however, is classified as part of the Niger-Congo family of languages spoken by black Africans, and the earliest historical documentation reports that the Fulani were living in the westernmost Sudan close to ancient Ghana. The development of this organized kingdom thrust pastoral peoples outward, and the ancestors of the modern Fulani seem to have chosen to settle to the southwest, toward the middle Sénégal valley. But there another settled, and (from the 11th century) an Islamized, black kingdom evolved, that of Tekrur. Some Fulani participated in this kingdom and became Tukulor—the Tukulor and Fulani languages being practically identical. Some, however, chose not to accept the settled way of life and, to preserve their traditional pastoral and religious customs, migrated eastward over the savanna grasslands. Grazing land was available between the agricultural villages, and the growing towns provided the Fulani with markets where they could exchange their pastoral produce for agricultural and manufactured goods. Eventually some Fulani settled in these towns, no doubt initially as trading agents for their fellows in the countryside, where the bulk of the Fulani continued to live under their own leaders, aloof from the social and political life of the cultivators, though increasingly paying rent for their grazing and rendering military services to the settled authorities.

In this way, by the 15th century large numbers of Fulani had settled in the Fouta Djallon and in and around Macina, the inland delta country of the Niger upstream of Timbuktu, and they were beginning to appear as far east as Hausaland, where today many millions of their descendants live. By the 16th century the Fulani were appearing in Bornu, and by the 18th century large numbers of them were settling in the grassy uplands of the Cameroons. Although the bulk of the Fulani remained animists, gradually significant numbers of them became Muslims and indeed provided some of the leaders of Islam in western Africa.

The growth of organized statehood in the western African savannas also had important consequences for more southerly lands and peoples. Unsuccessful contestants for power in the major savanna states sometimes moved off toward the south. Traders from these states, especially from Mali and, later, from the Hausa kingdoms, also settled in the south as their trading networks developed, and they often had important political, as well as economic, influences on the tribal groups with whom they came to live. The consequences of these two kinds of movement, which were sometimes interlinked, can best be considered in two sections—firstly, those deriving from developments originating in the Mande sphere in the western savannas, and secondly, those deriving from the Hausa-Bornu region in the east.

In the west one notable emigration was that of the Susu, a Mande group that had lost out to the Keita in the 13th-century struggle for the inheritance of ancient Ghana. This emigration created a wedge of Mande-speaking people close to the Atlantic in the modern Republic of Guinea and in northern Sierra Leone among peoples who had not advanced politically beyond the village level. With the subsequent growth of Mali’s power, other smaller groups—sometimes traders, sometimes conquerors, often both—also infiltrated these West Atlantic coastlands. They began to organize their people into petty kingdoms that tended to owe a nominal allegiance to Mali. Major incentives for these migratory movements seem to have been the desire to gain access to coastal supplies of salt and, from the 15th century onward, to the foreign merchandise brought by European sea traders.

In the 16th century the West Atlantic coastlands were invaded by yet another Mande group, the Mane, who advanced westward parallel to the coast from Liberia onward. These were military bands that systematically attacked and overcame the villages of each tribal group they came across. Some of them would stay behind to organize these conquests into small kingdoms, while others, reinforced by auxiliaries recruited from among their victims, would proceed farther west to repeat the pattern. Their advance was halted only when they came up against the Susu. South and east of the Susu, however, the West Atlantic social and ethnic patterns were considerably altered by the actions of the Mane. New Mande-speaking groups emerged, such as the Mende and Loko, while some West Atlantic peoples who retained their original language, such as the Temne, accepted a new aristocracy of Mane provenance.

The Mane advance into the West Atlantic coastlands from the east may have been connected with the growth of Mande influence in the Ivory Coast (modern Côte d’Ivoire) and in modern Ghana. This was commercial in origin; Dyula merchants developed trade routes in search of gold, slaves, and kola nuts, in exchange for which they offered salt, cloth, and other Sudanic or North African goods. It is known that by 1500 the Dyula were trading as far south as the coast of modern Ghana, and their first contact with the Akan peoples who populate almost all the southern half of this territory was probably one or two centuries earlier than this.

This development of trade by the Dyula in modern Ghana and in the adjacent Ivory Coast had important political consequences, and sometimes military implications as well. Ambitious Akan chiefs began to develop and expand their political power to secure the maximum profit from the exploitation of the resources of as much territory and as many people as possible. On the northern fringes of the forest, astride the routes along which gold and kola nuts were brought for exchange with the Dyula, important new kingdoms emerged such as Bono and Banda, both of which were probably in existence by about 1400. As the economic value of gold and kola became appreciated, the forest to the south of these states—which had hitherto been little inhabited because it was less favourable for agriculture than were the savannas—became more thickly populated, and the same principles of political and military mobilization began to be applied there. Village communities became tributaries of ruling groups, with some of their members becoming the clients and slaves needed for the support of the royal households, armies, and trading enterprises. By 1500 most of the Akan territory seems to have been organized in this way and, as trade increased, so the political units—initially very small—tended to increase in size.

Sometimes these political changes were not to the advantage of the Dyula, who employed Mande warriors to guard their caravans and, if necessary, could call in larger contingents from the Sudanic kingdoms. Tensions between the Dyula and the increasingly powerful animist monarchy of Banda erupted in the 17th century into a civil war that destroyed the kingdom and led its Dyula merchants to establish a new trading base of their own farther to the west at Bonduku (Bondoukou). In the following centuries there were at least two major examples of the Dyula taking political authority for themselves at strategic points on the trade routes running through the eastern Ivory Coast.

But the most interesting Mande political initiative along the trade routes south of Jenne was the creation in the early 17th century, just north of the Akan lands, of the new Dyula state of Gonja. This seems to have been inspired by a general worsening of the competitive position of the Mande traders, and it was occasioned by three factors: (1) the near monopoly in the control of the export of forest produce achieved by the Akan kingdom of Bono, (2) the rise to power farther north of the Dagomba kingdom, which controlled local salt pans, and (3) the arrival in the region about 1500 of rival long-distance traders from Hausaland. The Dyula seem to have tried to combat these developments by erecting a major kingdom of their own in Gonja—the territory that the northern traders had to cross to reach the Akan forestlands. But much of Gonja was barren, and its kings lacked the resource base to withstand the growth of Akan power.

Rather less is known about the nature of Sudanic influences in the more easterly zone south of Hausaland and of Bornu. However, it has already been suggested that Dagomba (and a number of similar kingdoms in the Volta basin, including Mamprusi) and the Mossi kingdoms—such as Wagadugu (Ouagadougou) and Yatenga (or Wahiguya), north of Dagomba and closer to the Niger Bend—were founded by conquerors coming from the east. The structures of these kingdoms, which were extant into the beginning of the colonial era, seem to have been erected about the 15th century by relatively small bands of immigrants who eventually merged with the autochthonous Gur-speaking inhabitants of the Volta basin. Their success in conquering and organizing the Gur villages into kingdoms seems to have been due to their possession of cavalry, which subsequently remained a badge of royalty and of aristocracy.

Somewhat earlier, and farther to the east, astride the Niger and closer to Hausaland, similar kingdoms seem to have been developed through the same kind of process by invaders who may well have been ancestral to the Mossi-Dagomba state builders. Examples of these survived in Borgu into colonial times. An interesting corpus of legends—such as that of Kisra, a character derived from the Sāsānian conqueror of Egypt, Khosrow II, who is supposed to have migrated southwestward from the Nile valley founding various kingdoms—suggests that state-building invaders also proceeded south of Borgu and Hausaland through Nupe, Jukun, Igala, Yoruba, and Benin territory (all in modern Nigeria) to as far as southern Dahomey and to the southeasternmost tip of modern Ghana. Much of this territory, however, was subjugated in the 19th century by Muslim Fulani and Hausa, and the legends as they survive often have an Islamic colouring, which makes it difficult to assess their historicity. It could well be that the traditions of the autochthonous pagans had become coloured by the folklore of incoming Muslim traders. But if the legends are really evidence of conquest, there can be no doubt that the conquered peoples had already achieved a high degree of cultural, economic, and—probably—political sophistication.

The archaeological evidence of the Nok culture shows that the inhabitants of central Nigeria engaged in agriculture and were using iron and other metals by about 500 bce. It is moreover generally accepted that the terra-cotta sculptures associated with Nok are precursors of the later court sculpture of southwestern Nigeria, in bronze or brass and stone as well as terra-cotta. The bronze or brass sculpture of Yoruba and of the kingdom of Benin is especially famous for its naturalism and for the high degree of metallurgical skill used to cast the figures by the lost-wax process.

Tradition asserts that the Yoruba town of Ife (Ile-Ife) was the centre from which this art, and the type of monarchy that supported it, spread to other parts of the region. Modern archaeologists have found nothing to contradict this and have moreover provided evidence for the existence in Yorubaland of a high degree of urbanization by at least the 11th century. Thus in southwestern Nigeria urban civilization seems at least contemporary with the same development in Hausaland and in Kanem-Bornu, the point of departure for Kisra-type conquerors. The probability, therefore, is that if the Kisra and similar legends are evidence of conquering cavaliers, they were—like the Saharan invaders in the Sudan—exploiting rather than creating urban civilizations, though no doubt they may have welded smaller units into larger kingdoms.

It should be pointed out that the territory southwest of Hausaland toward Dahomey is often open country suited to the deployment of cavalry. The effectiveness of cavalry decreased southeastward toward the forest; in the Benin kingdom, horses were little more than residual symbols of monarchical and aristocratic power. Still farther east, in the forest on the other side of the Niger, where there are no traditions of invasion or of developed monarchical government, the archaeological finds at Igbo Ukwu revealed that ancestors of the modern Igbo (Ibo) had, as early as the 9th century, a sophisticated society with surpluses of wealth supporting considerable craft specialization, including a highly developed bronze art with a distinctive style of its own. Recent thinking suggests that the origins of the small, competitive city-states of the eastern Niger delta south of Igboland, with which Europeans were to develop flourishing commerce from the 17th century, may well be associated with earlier, purely indigenous trading activities of which very little is at present known.

On the available evidence, the establishment in eastern Guinea of the network of Hausa trade and trade routes in the form in which it has been known in modern times, essentially similar to the Mande system farther west, can hardly be dated earlier than about the 16th century. Yet the European traders arriving at Benin, in the Yoruba coastlands, and in the Niger delta, from the end of the 15th century, were able to secure regular supplies of goods, some of which (e.g., cloth and beads) clearly originated in the hinterland and seem to have had an already extant market among the Akan peoples of southern Ghana. This presupposes appreciable indigenous commercial development in eastern Guinea before the emergence of the Hausa system.

The arrival of European sea traders at the Guinea coastlands in the 15th century clearly marks a new epoch in their history and in the history of all of western Africa. The pioneers were the Portuguese, southwestern Europeans with the necessary knowledge, experience, and national purpose to embark on the enterprise of developing oceanic trade routes with Africa and Asia. Their main goals were in Asia, but to reach Asia it was necessary to circumnavigate Africa, in the process of which they hoped, among other things, to make contact with Mali and to divert some of the trans-Saharan gold trade from Muslim North Africa to Christian Europe.

The colonization of the Cape Verde Islands, from the 1460s onward, provided bases for trade with the fringes of the Mali empire. The most momentous discovery in western Africa, however, came in 1471, when Portuguese captains first reached the coast of modern Ghana between the mouths of the Ankobra and Volta rivers. It was quickly appreciated that the Akan peoples of this coast had access to supplies of gold, which were plentiful by contemporary European standards, and that they were willing and organized to trade some of this gold for base metals, cloth, and other manufactures. The Portuguese called this coast Mina, “the mine,” while in European languages generally it became known as the Gold Coast.

The wealth obtainable from trade with the Gold Coast was so important for the completion of the Portuguese design to establish regular commerce with Asia by circumnavigating Africa that the Portuguese crown quickly took steps to exclude foreign rivals from the western African trade and to bring it under its direct control. Portugal was not a naturally wealthy nation, however, and its overseas interests had become very widely extended by the beginning of the 16th century. The western African coastlands and their trade were only one element in a system that also embraced the Congo and Angola, Brazil, the East African littoral, and India and the East Indies. By and large it was the trade of the latter that was regarded as the major prize, and elsewhere activities tended to be restricted to those which might strengthen the prosperity of the overseas enterprise as a whole without unduly straining the limited resources, especially perhaps of labour, available for its control and exploitation.

The general strategy in western Africa—as elsewhere in the Portuguese trading empire—was to keep territorial and administrative commitments to the minimum necessary to develop and benefit Portuguese commercial activities that were already in existence. The main interest in western Africa was the gold trade of Mina, and it was there—and virtually there alone—that the Portuguese endeavoured to maintain a positive presence on the mainland. In 1482 they built the strong fort that they called São Jorge da Mina (the modern Elmina Castle) on the shores of the Gold Coast, on land leased from the local Akan, and in subsequent years this was supplemented by the construction of three additional forts, at Axim, Shama, and Accra. The purpose of these forts and their garrisons was to try to ensure that the local people sold their gold only to agents of the Portuguese crown. No other Europeans succeeded in establishing lasting footholds on the Gold Coast before the close of the 16th century, and the Portuguese purpose was largely achieved. The surviving records suggest that up to about 1550 the Portuguese were securing from the Gold Coast on average at least 12,400 ounces of gold each year, a sizable proportion of the production then available to Europe.

In exchange, the Gold Coast peoples needed to be supplied with commodities they desired, and this presented Portugal with a problem, as it was not a major manufacturing nation. The raw iron and copper, metal goods, cloth, and other items that were in demand on the Gold Coast had to be purchased elsewhere. Some of the cloth exported to the Gold Coast was in fact brought from Morocco (and may therefore have been in competition with a trade in cloth that had earlier reached the Akan from the north), and the requirements of their Gold Coast customers were a prime factor in leading the Portuguese to develop relations with the kingdom of Benin and the Niger delta, where further supplies of cloth, and also of beads and slaves that were in demand on the Gold Coast, could be obtained.

At first the Portuguese hoped to control the trade of Benin and surrounding areas by converting the kingdom, or at least its court, to Christianity and turning it into a satellite protectorate of their empire. Although this kind of policy was initially successful elsewhere in Africa, notably in the Kongo (Bakongo) kingdom of northern Angola, the Benin monarchy was powerful enough to reject European pressures and infiltration. From about 1520 onward, the Portuguese were virtually excluded from Benin, and their trade with the Niger delta was conducted from São Tomé and from the other islands of the Gulf of Guinea that they had colonized. This trade was principally in slaves, from the Congo and Angola as well as from the delta, who were employed on plantations to grow tropical produce, sugar in particular, for the European market.

Apart from an abortive attempt to intercept the western trans-Saharan trade from a fort that was erected on the island of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania, the other principal Portuguese activity in western Africa was the trade with the coastlands of Upper Guinea that was conducted by the settlers on the Cape Verde Islands (which, together with Madeira, were also developed as plantation colonies employing African slave labour). The empire of Mali was in decline, but the Portuguese were not strong enough to control trade so far into the interior. What ultimately developed, on the creeks and islands of the coast from the Gambia to Sierra Leone, was a number of informal settlements where traders from the Cape Verde Islands did some trade with Mande merchants and with the local peoples. Gradually they married into the local trading and ruling families and, escaping formal Portuguese control, became agents of the African commercial system who sought to secure the best terms they could from any visiting European trader irrespective of nationality.

It may be doubted whether this first period of European involvement with western Africa, from about 1450 to 1600, had much effect on the course of its history. The only Europeans consistently involved were the Portuguese, who were not strong outside the Gold Coast and who were really only interested in controlling some aspects of trade, and these only in a few selected areas of the coastlands where new opportunities had been opened up for a few members of the ruling and trading classes. Perhaps the main changes were that a few Africans acquired some acquaintance with Christianity and with elements of the Portuguese language—a pidgin variety of which became the lingua franca of coastal commerce for some centuries—and that western African farmers were introduced to some new crops and fruits, usually of tropical American provenance, which they quickly adopted if they were more productive than their established cultigens. For example, corn (maize) was more productive than millet and cassava more productive than yams under certain conditions.

The new era of maritime intercourse with the outside world was probably of marked significance only on the Gold Coast. There new avenues of wealth had been opened up for some of the Akan in trade at the coast. There too a new political problem had emerged of how to ensure regular and profitable commercial dealings with the Europeans, while at the same time preventing the coastal footholds, which the Europeans required as entrepôts, from subverting the sovereignty of the indigenous states. This was a very real problem, because the coastal kingdoms were small and divided among themselves in competition for the trade with the Europeans. Elmina certainly, and to some extent Axim also, did in fact develop independent jurisdictions over the mixed European, African, and mulatto trading communities that developed beneath the walls of the forts. Beyond these, the difficulty of maintaining large and effective forces of European soldiers in the tropics meant that the Portuguese could only exert power through African allies. The coastal people were thus able to maintain the principle that the land on which the forts were built was not ceded, but only leased. If the Portuguese lost their allies’ confidence, the latter could refuse to supply or help defend the forts, or even destroy them altogether (as happened for the first time at Accra in the 1570s).

The coastal peoples generally, and those of the Gold Coast in particular, were certainly prepared to welcome the merchants of other European nations so as to decrease their dependence on the Portuguese. The first Europeans effectively to break into the Portuguese monopoly of sea trade with western Africa were the Dutch, who had been some of the principal distributors in northwestern Europe of the Asian, African, and American produce imported into Portugal and Spain. After the northern Netherlands had revolted against Spanish rule, however, and Philip II of Spain (who since 1580 had been king of Portugal also) had sought to punish the Dutch merchants by excluding them from the Iberian ports, they were stimulated to organize oceanic trading ventures of their own and from 1598 established on the Gold Coast the first Dutch trading posts in western Africa.

The principal targets for Dutch aggression, however, were in the East Indies and in the Americas, and the effective assertion of Dutch power against Portugal in western Africa was a by-product of the success of the Dutch West India Company in destroying Spanish naval power in the Caribbean and in embarking on the conquest of the plantation colony that the Portuguese had established in Brazil. As a result, by the end of the 1630s the Dutch had established themselves as principal suppliers and customers of the Spanish plantations in the Caribbean, while in Brazil they were themselves in possession of a plantation colony.

The production on American plantations of tropical produce, of which sugar was the most important, and especially the marketing of this produce in western Europe, were extremely profitable activities. But plantation agriculture in the tropics required large and regular supplies of cheap labour. America did not have these, but, just across the Atlantic, western Africa seemed to have relatively great quantities of productive labour. As early as the 1440s, the Portuguese had begun to transport some African slaves to supplement the meagre labour resources of their own country (especially of the southern provinces they had reconquered from the Moors), and their own plantations in Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, and, ultimately, on the islands of the Gulf of Guinea had come to be dependent on African slave labour. The Spaniards, and subsequently other Europeans, in America thus naturally came to look to Africa to make good their labour shortage, and a slave trade to the Caribbean had commenced on a small scale in the 1520s.

Spain had little in the way of trade in Africa itself, so the authorities gave out contracts for the supply of slaves to other merchants, and the ultimate suppliers were usually Portuguese. From the 1570s onward, Portugal’s slave traders had a further American market in their own colony of Brazil. The large slave population on their Gulf of Guinea islands was getting out of control, with the result that many Portuguese planters were abandoning these islands and reestablishing their activities in Brazil.

By the time the Dutch West India Company entered the scene in the mid-1620s, in all probability about 400,000 slaves had been imported into the Americas, and the annual volume of imports had risen to about 10,000 a year. This was a sizable business compared with the earlier trades in African slaves to Europe (which had virtually ceased by the 1550s, when perhaps 50,000 slaves had been imported) or to the Atlantic and Gulf of Guinea islands (which by the 1620s had probably received rather more than 100,000 slaves, but whose imports were then less than 500 a year). The demand for slaves in the Americas was also beginning to increase rapidly. In the wake of the Dutch defeat of Spanish naval power, English and French colonists were beginning to settle the smaller Caribbean islands and were seeking to exploit their soils for tropical agriculture with as many slaves as possible, while Spanish official restrictions on the volume of slave imports in their territories were hardly effective.

The labour needs of the plantations it had conquered in Brazil made it imperative that the Dutch West India Company should begin to secure slaves from Africa, and it very quickly recognized that the supply of slaves to European colonists elsewhere in the Americas was an extremely profitable business. To ensure its sources of supply, the Dutch company embarked on the conquest of all the Portuguese bases on the western African shores. Some of these, for example the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, were subsequently lost to it, but by 1642 the Dutch were firmly in possession of the Portuguese forts on the Gold Coast, and they dominated Europe’s trade with western Africa from Cape Verde to the Niger delta. By the 1660s probably as many as 15,000 African slaves were being landed in the Americas each year. Nearly half of this trade was Portuguese, for this nation had by then recovered its possessions in both Brazil and Angola and had a near monopoly of the trade south of the equator, but the remainder, the growing part, was in northern European hands.

The Dutch West India Company’s activities in the Atlantic slave trade aroused interest throughout the ports of northwestern Europe, and soon merchants from France, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, as well as private Dutch traders, were competing with the Dutch company. French and British competition soon became of major importance. Both countries were resentful of the growing economic power of the Netherlands that was based on foreign trade, and both possessed colonies in the Americas. Their governments decided that their colonists should not be dependent on Dutch merchants for their supplies of labour (nor, for that matter, for capital or for the marketing of their produce in Europe). Through grants of monopolies of their nations’ trade with western Africa or the West Indies, French and English merchants were encouraged to form companies strong enough to challenge the power of the Dutch West India Company, and these challenges were supported by the warships of their respective royal navies.

Between 1652 and 1713 there was a succession of wars involving France, Britain, and the Netherlands. The main battles were usually fought far away from Africa, but throughout the period the traders of each nation sought to increase the number of their trading posts on the western African coast and to deny trade to their rivals. A large number of new forts was built, and these forts were constantly changing hands.

Anglo-French competition

By 1713, however, a pattern of European activity had emerged that was to remain more or less constant until the Atlantic slave trade was brought to an end during the first half of the 19th century (and that was considerably to influence the subsequent partition of western Africa between European empires). The hold that the Dutch had established over Europe’s oceanic commerce was destroyed, and Britain and France competed with each other for its inheritance. The Anglo-French wars of the 18th century had less direct effect on western Africa than did the earlier wars involving the Dutch, but the development of trade with western Africa to supply slaves for their American colonies continued to be an important aim of both countries.

France emerged as master of the coastal trade north of the Gambia River, where it had taken the strategic naval base on Gorée Island, close by Cape Verde, from the Dutch in 1677 and was developing a fort and town at Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Sénégal River as a major commercial centre. By and large, however, this part of the coast produced relatively few slaves, and the French companies operating from Saint-Louis sought compensation by developing the trade of the Sénégal basin in gum and hides and by penetrating upriver toward the alluvial goldfields of Bambuk. Little of permanence was achieved in the 18th century, however, in part because of the resistance of the local peoples, but mainly because of the growing naval power of Britain. Britain’s strategic interests almost invariably led it to occupy Gorée and Saint-Louis in each of the sea wars of the century, and from 1758 to 1779 its government attempted to consolidate its conquests there into a formal colony.

But the Colony of the Senegambia was not a success. Britain’s merchants were not willing to follow up its naval and military successes in this region, and French traders were allowed to creep back. The main results of Britain’s initiative were to interrupt French imperial ambitions in the Sénégal valley for nearly a century, and, on the British side, to contribute to a growing opinion—associated particularly with the loss of the North American colonies and the views of Adam Smith—that formal empire was less important and valuable than the independent operations of a growing host of individual British traders, operating wherever there was profit to be found under the general cover of British naval supremacy.

British traders competed with the French on the Gambia River, where both nations’ companies maintained forts, and also established themselves to some extent on the coast of Sierra Leone, but initially the main centre of British activity in western Africa was the Gold Coast. Because the Gold Coast had been the scene first of the major Portuguese and then of the major Dutch successes in western African trade, its peoples were better organized than most to provide European traders with what they sought, and the fact that they could supply gold as well as slaves remained of major importance.

During the period of intensive competition in the later 18th century, the number of major European forts on this 300-mile-long coastline had risen to approximately 30. The Dutch West India Company still had more Gold Coast forts than anyone else, and these by and large were the strongest and best maintained. But their headquarters at Elmina was now rivaled by the British castle at Cape Coast only a few miles away, and indeed almost every Dutch fort had an adjacent British establishment competing with it. The French never succeeded in getting a permanent foothold on the Gold Coast; Swedish and German ventures eventually came under Dutch or British control, and traders from Denmark retained forts only on the eastern Gold Coast, where there was little gold and slaves were the main articles of trade.

Although the formal position of the Dutch on the Gold Coast remained strong throughout the 18th century, and indeed into the 19th century, they steadily lost trade to the British merchants. One reason for this was simply that Britain had displaced the Netherlands as the major naval and sea-trading power in western Europe and, through the developing Industrial Revolution, was better able to supply overseas traders with cheap goods for the world market. The British were also more successful than their rivals in adapting the nature of their operations to changing conditions of trade.

The Dutch on the Gold Coast and the French in Senegal tended to hold to the view that the African trade should be conducted through large corporations, which had military and administrative as well as commercial responsibilities and which were rewarded for these by their monopoly rights. Such companies had been essential if the original Portuguese monopoly of African maritime trade were to be broken, or if the national interest in it were to be maintained in the subsequent period of militant European rivalry for the trade. The intensity of the competition during about 1650 until about 1713 had made the business of building or capturing and of maintaining and defending coastal forts extremely expensive. On the other hand, the breakthrough into trade with Africans had been made, and the ever-increasing demand for slaves led to a great widening of European commercial activities along the coast. Thus by the beginning of the 18th century there were few parts of the coastlands where African rulers and merchants were not prepared and organized to sell slaves in some numbers.

Hence the future lay not with the cumbersome companies, with large amounts of capital locked up in costly forts, but with a host of small European traders, who were not tied to particular shore installations but were seeking for the best terms of trade they could find along the coast. This type of European trader was naturally welcomed by African rulers, newly embarking on trade with the Europeans, who had no wish to see the latter establish permanent bases on their coasts, which, as the Gold Coast forts had done, might develop political claims to challenge their own traditional jurisdictions. It was the British traders, protected by their country’s command of the sea and backed by the abundant supplies of goods and capital produced by its revolutionary economic growth, who were most successful in exploiting the new pattern of trade.

The old monopoly companies had never been strong on the coast between the Gambia River and the Gold Coast. In the north this was largely due to the effects of the breakdown of the early Portuguese attempts at controlling the trade. Farther south, the territories of modern Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire had not excited much interest among early European traders. Their coastline was treacherous for navigation, and their thick forests supported a scanty population that was little organized for commerce. Such trade as had developed, principally in ivory and in agricultural produce, did not warrant much investment in shore establishments. Thus, as the American demand for slaves increased, the Upper Guinea coast became frequented by increasing numbers of small traders who competed bitterly with each other for slaves.

The greatest opportunities for the new class of individual European traders lay not to the west but to the east of the Gold Coast, where populations were denser and much better organized, not only politically but also commercially and specifically in their access to developed trade routes linking them with inland centres of population, production, wealth, and organized government. European sea captains knew this coast well enough, for the best sailing routes to return to Europe from the Gold Coast ran via the Gulf of Guinea and its islands. European trade had been held back there only because there had been no staple export to compare with the gold of the Gold Coast. Nevertheless, their ships’ need of provisioning for the return voyage, the local trade between the Niger delta and the Gold Coast, and the early slave trade to São Tomé and Brazil had led to a demand developing among the African peoples for European manufactures such as metals and metalware, cloth, guns and ammunition, and spirits, and there was a network of traders and trade routes to expand trade with the interior if a staple African export could be found.

The rapidly increasing demand for slaves as West Indian and American plantation production began to boom provided this staple. In the second half of the 17th century, Dutch, French, English, and Portuguese traders became increasingly involved in trade on the coast between the Gold Coast and Benin, which soon in fact received the name of the Slave Coast. Initially the company-fort pattern of trading was applied here, but it never took root to the extent that it had done on the Gold Coast, in part because the local rulers insisted that the forts should be built in their own inland towns. As the slave trade further developed, both on the Slave Coast itself and also further east, in the Niger delta region, it became typically an enterprise of individual European or American traders or small partnerships, who acknowledged the authority of the local rulers and paid the fees and duties these demanded.

As has been seen, in the 1620s, on the eve of the great growth of the Atlantic slave trade that followed the Dutch entry into it, the number of African slaves reaching the Americas was about 10,000 a year. In the last quarter of the 17th century, the average annual American import was some 25,000, and the total number of African slaves imported during the century has been estimated at 1,494,000. In the following century it operated on a vastly greater scale; the best available estimate for the number of Africans imported into the New World in the 18th century is some 5.2 million. After about 1815, and especially after the 1840s, the measures taken to outlaw European and American slave dealing, and also—more significantly—the possession of slaves in the Americas, began to take effect, and in the 1860s the Atlantic trade was finally brought to an end after a further 2,780,000 slaves had been landed in the Americas.

The peak of the Atlantic slave trade seems to have been reached in the 1780s, when on average some 78,000 slaves were brought to the Americas each year. About half these slaves were transported in the ships of British merchants. Their nearest competitors, the French and Portuguese traders, carried each about a fifth of the total. Subsequently the French trade (and also the Dutch and Danish trades) virtually ceased as a result of the British blockade of Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of the turn of the century, and the British predominance was even more marked, possibly 60 percent of the trade being in British hands, compared with perhaps 25 percent for Portugal and 15 percent for North American merchants.

The slave-trade era

All the estimates for the volume of the Atlantic slave trade that have been given so far are for numbers of slaves landed in the Americas, as such numbers are generally more readily ascertainable than figures for slaves leaving Africa. A fair proportion of these slaves never reached the other side of the Atlantic because of deaths from disease, maltreatment, or maritime disaster. Evidence from the 18th and 19th centuries, when the vast majority of the slaves were transported, suggests that on average the loss may have been about 15 percent; in earlier times losses are likely to have been higher, perhaps averaging 20 percent.

Not all the slaves were taken from western Africa as defined in this article. Considerable numbers were always taken from Africa south of the equator, and in the 19th century the measures taken to stop the North Atlantic slave trade were quicker and more effective than those against the trade across the South Atlantic. It seems safe to suggest that, up to and including the 18th century, 60 percent of the slaves were taken from the western African coasts from the Sénégal River to the Cameroons and that in the 19th century the proportion dropped to about one-third. It is thus possible to arrive at the following estimates for the loss of population to western Africa.

Population loss due to Atlantic slave trade

from Africa as a whole

from western Africa north of the Equator

arriving overseas

leaving Africa

percentage

estimated total

before 1600

290,000

370,000

60

220,000

1601–1700

1,490,000

1,870,000

60

1,120,000

1701–1810

5,150,000

6,130,000

60

3,680,000

after 1810

2,780,000

3,270,000

33

1,090,000

total

9,710,000

11,640,000

—

6,110,000

It is not easy to assess what effects such a loss of population may have had on western Africa and on the course of its history. In the first place, it must not be forgotten that almost all statistics concerning the slave trade involve some degree of estimation. Those used here are based on the analyses of the available data by the American historian Philip D. Curtin and by the Canadian historian Paul E. Lovejoy; they are unlikely to be more than ±20 percent from the reality.

Second, there is really no means of knowing the size of the population of western Africa at any time during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. Working backward from the population data available in the 20th century (which are not themselves always very reliable) and from the evidence these provide for rates of growth, it is possible to suppose that at the beginning of the 18th century, when the Atlantic slave trade was entering its dominant phase, the total population of western Africa may have been about 25 million and its natural rate of increase may have been some 0.15 percent per annum. Although these estimates can be little more than guesses, they do tend to suggest that the commonly held idea that the export slave trade actually depopulated western Africa is not likely to be right.

When the slave trade was at its height during the 18th century, the export of slaves was averaging 45,000 a year. This loss would have been about equal to the assumed natural increase in population, so that the effect might have been to have checked population growth rather than to have actually diminished the population. In earlier centuries or in the 19th century, it would not even have had this effect: population would have been growing, albeit more slowly than with no export of slaves.

But these are gross calculations that take no account of the uneven selection of slaves for export. Since the American planters, and hence the slave traders, looked in particular for fit slaves in the prime of life, between about 15 and 35 years old, it may be argued that robbing western Africa of people particularly from this group of its population would especially tend to reduce births and thereby reduce the capacity of the population to maintain its numbers. On the other hand, however, the planters preferred their slaves to be male, and only about a third of those exported were women. Thus, since western African men who could afford it were polygynous, the birth rate may have been less affected than might have been expected. There is also evidence to suggest that the fitter or more intelligent slaves were often kept at home, and that less fit individuals were in many ways prepared to deceive the European buyers as to their age or condition.

It can also be argued that, since some parts of the coast saw the export of many more slaves than did others, the regions adjacent to these coasts suffered much more severely than the overall figures for western Africa as a whole might suggest. In the peak period of the 1780s, the distribution of exports along the coast was approximately as follows: from the Senegambia and Sierra Leone, about 7,000 slaves a year (about 15 percent of the total from western Africa as a whole); from the Gold Coast, about 9,400 (20 percent); from the Slave Coast and the Benin region, about 16,000 (35 percent); and from the Niger delta and the Cameroons, about 13,400 (29 percent). The three last zones—Lower Guinea—today have populations as dense as any to be found in tropical Africa, and the available evidence suggests that their population was also relatively great in the 18th century—certainly by and large denser than that of most parts of Upper Guinea.

It is therefore possible to conclude that the largest numbers of slaves came from just those regions that could most afford to export population. It is also unlikely to be a coincidence that it was this same area—from the Gold Coast to the Cameroons—which was the most highly developed coastal region in terms of government, economic production, and trade. It was only in areas of low population and poor indigenous organization that foreign slave traders ever needed to set out to capture slaves for themselves. This naturally made the Africans involved hostile to further dealings with the traders, while it also tended to reduce the power of the population to maintain and feed itself, so that in both cases supplies of slaves were ultimately fewer. For the most part, the European traders bought the slaves they needed from African merchants and rulers who had organized to offer slaves for sale.

About half these slaves were unfortunates in their own societies: criminals, the mentally or physically handicapped, debtors or those who had been sold for debt or pledged as security for a debt, those who had offended men of power or influence, or simply those who in some way had become outcasts from the family and tribal systems. Selling such people was usually simply an alternative to keeping them in some kind of servitude in domestic society or, in more extreme situations, condemning them to execution or to serve as human sacrifices in the festivals of ancestral or land cults.

The remainder of the slaves exported were strangers to the societies that sold them, sometimes unwary travelers or border villagers who were kidnapped, but for the most part prisoners of war. Europeans sometimes argued that African kings went to war often with the prime purpose of securing slaves for the slave trade. In the 19th century, when the Europeans themselves had outlawed the slave trade, this argument was used to justify the advance of European colonial rule. On the other hand, in the 18th century, some European slave traders claimed that the acquisition of slaves was simply a consequence of wars which were natural occurrences. From this they argued that they were actually doing a service to such captives and to humanity by buying them and selling them into hard labour on the American plantations. They claimed that they were rescuing the slaves from the danger of being executed or of becoming human sacrifices and that slavery under civilized Christian masters was preferable to slavery in primitive, pagan African society.

Despite the speciousness of the latter claim, the 18th-century slavers’ argument seems nearer the truth than that of the 19th-century abolitionists. African wars, like wars anywhere else, were the consequence of rivalries for wealth and power between states. Whereas elsewhere the wealth and power of a monarchy might be measured in terms of the amount of territory it controlled, or in terms of the monetary value of its resources, the prime measure of both power and wealth in Africa was people. By and large land in Africa had very little economic value. There was almost invariably far more land available than there were people to cultivate it or to develop its mineral and other resources. The key to the strength of a kingdom thus lay in its ability to gain control of human energy, and an obvious way to do this was to take people away from its neighbours and rivals. This, indeed, was how western African kingdoms had come to be built up, by the natural rulers of particular small kinship groups securing for themselves and their units more clients and slaves than their neighbours, and by using them to extend their power over these neighbours and even farther afield.

People then were the important resource. Often, indeed, a person was the unit of value in which other resources were measured: thus the value of horses, or guns, or parcels of trade goods was often expressed in terms of the numbers of slaves (i.e., disposable people) for which they might be exchanged. If more people were available, then more land, or gold or iron or salt, might be exploited or more trade might be done (the environment was hostile to transport animals, so that trade depended heavily on the availability of porters and canoemen). Thus there would be greater surpluses available to support the monarch, his household, his administration, and his army, and to maintain specialized manufactures, crafts, and services.

The purpose of wars was thus to increase the power and wealth of a kingdom by increasing its human power and diminishing that of its rivals. The ruling philosophy cannot therefore have been one favouring the export of slaves. But it was one in which the economic value of a person was very well established. With the growth of trade, and especially of international trade which made available desirable commodities that seemed as valuable or sometimes more valuable than people, it was natural for African kings and their traders to think of selling some men and women in exchange for these commodities, and especially so if the foreign merchants who offered these commodities were themselves interested in acquiring slaves.

Pre-European slave trading

This situation had first arisen, and at a very early stage, in the trans-Saharan trade. Labour was needed to work the Saharan salt deposits, and the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Middle East had long had a demand for slaves. Some North African and Middle Eastern exports, particularly perhaps horses, were so valuable in the Sudan that its kings were quite ready to exchange some of their scarce human power to secure these. However, the problems involved in marching slaves across the Sahara with its scarce and widely separated resources of water were formidable. Although reliable estimates are lacking, it is generally supposed that the trans-Saharan slave trade could rarely if ever have transported more than 6,000 or 7,000 slaves a year. After the middle of the 17th century, however, the demand of the Atlantic trade for slaves was practically insatiable, and, as has been seen, at its peak during the 18th century, each year about seven times as many slaves were leaving the western African coasts.

A high proportion of these slaves, nearly a third, were being exported—as has been seen—from the Niger delta region. The communities of Ijo (Ijaw), Ibibio, and Efik fishermen and salt makers, who controlled the waterways to the interior, developed city-states whose whole fortunes came to be bound up with the slave trade. Most of their slaves were brought from their immediate hinterland. It is probably significant that some of this hinterland, particularly that inhabited by the Igbo and the Tiv, today has the highest population densities to be found anywhere in tropical Africa—some Igbo densities being as much as 1,500 persons to the square mile. Igbo country is not rich in natural resources, however, and its water supplies are poor. In the 20th century one result was the emigration of many Igbo to sell their labour in other parts of Nigeria. Some scholars believe that something of this population pressure may have already been evident during the slave-trade era.

It is noteworthy that, although the American demand for slaves was rising steadily from about 1630 onward, every other part of the coast seems quite soon to have reached a figure for slave exports which thereafter remained more or less constant until the 19th century. Then two things happened: first, there was a breakdown in the system of law and order that had hitherto operated in Yoruba country to the west of the Niger delta, with the result that exports from the Slave Coast began to increase; and second, after the early 1860s, the American demand fell off sharply. There is a strong implication that in the 17th and 18th centuries the other major slave-exporting regions with relatively large populations had developed politico-economic systems which were able more or less consciously to calculate the balance of advantage for themselves of engaging in the export slave trade. By and large their conclusion seems to have been that it was more profitable to exchange some of their labour for European goods than it was to keep it all at home, but that it was dangerous to export more than a certain controlled quantity.

The Atlantic slave trade was not simply a rape of African labour to serve European purposes in the Americas. In any case, slaves were not the sole African exports by sea during the slave-trade era. Gold, gum, hides, timbers, palm oil, and other commodities were also traded, and the European merchants needed to buy large quantities of provisions to feed the slaves during the Atlantic crossing. The slaves and other exports had to be purchased, and in exchange Africans received supplies of other goods—cloth, metals, tools, knives and other hardware, guns and ammunition, beads and small manufactures, tobacco and spirits—that, however much their prices may have been inflated in relation to their cost in Europe or America, were thought by their purchasers to be at least as valuable as the slaves or other goods they had sold.

From the African point of view, the main importance of the slave trade may have been that it led to a great growth of all kinds of trade at the coasts and to a considerable stimulation of economic and political activity and organization for some distance into the interior of Guinea, a region which had hitherto been remote from the main centres of trade in western African history, which had been in the Sudan. It is difficult to quantify this growth of commercial activity, but coastal exports and imports combined, negligible prior to about 1500, may—in contemporary values—have been worth something like $3.5 million a year by 1700 and $8 million or more by 1800. This was a considerable trade by the standards of the time, as can be seen from comparison with an estimate in the 1850s of the value of the trade of Kano, then the most prosperous of the Sudanic kingdoms, at some $500,000 a year.

Some consequences of this rapid increase of trade on the Guinea Coast were fairly general. One was the appearance on the coast itself of a new class of African merchants, who freed themselves from some of the restrictions of traditional society and were able to accumulate personal wealth and power to rival that of the local kings. Sometimes, indeed, as at Komenda on the Gold Coast or at Opobo in the delta, the new men actually set themselves up as kings. This development owed much to the direct influence of the European trade on the coast. Some Europeans settled more or less permanently in Africa, married local women, and created new merchant dynasties, such as the Brews of the Gold Coast. Others of the new men were former slaves who had returned from America, particularly perhaps from Brazil to the Slave Coast. Many were local Africans, but usually men who had started by gaining useful contacts and training in the service of European merchants. All the new men were experienced in European ways and often secured for their sons elements of a European education.

The growth of Guinea’s international trade encouraged the spread and acceptance of regular systems of currency. Many, perhaps most, of the Guinea currencies were already extant on the coast when the Europeans arrived, but the growth of trade meant that certain of these became the sole acceptable currency within relatively large and well-defined areas, such as iron bars in Upper Guinea and much of the Niger delta, ounces of gold dust on the Gold Coast, and cowrie shells on the Slave Coast. Another development was the emergence on a considerable scale of production for sale. In Asante (Ashanti), for example, some villages were given over to the production of a particular commodity, such as cloth, and some of the chief men ran plantations with slave labour (as also, in the 19th century, did the kings of Dahomey).

The emergence of the trading city-states of the Niger delta represented a social revolution as well as a political innovation. The kinship system gave way to the “House” system, by which both freemen and the large numbers of slaves needed to operate trading canoes and strategic and trading settlements were bound together by common economic interests into large corporations headed by the leading merchants. On the Gold Coast and Slave Coast, however, political development was more akin to that which had earlier taken place in the Sudan under the influence of trans-Saharan trade.

Behind the Gold Coast the original centres of Akan trade and power had been north of the forest and northward-looking. The growth of trade at the coast led to new developments among the settlements in the forest, which had hitherto served only to produce gold and kola nuts for the northern trade. In the 17th century three major forest kingdoms emerged: Denkyera in the west, Akwamu to the east, and between them, Akyem. These competed with each other in expansion parallel to the coast to control as many as possible of the paths of trade to the European forts. Akyem lost, while Denkyera achieved such an overweening power that some of its northern tributaries secured guns and new techniques of political and military organization from Akwamu and rose in revolt. This was the effective origin of the new monarchy of Asante based on Kumasi, situated in the central forest where the major trade routes from the Gold Coast converged and met with the major routes of the Hausa and the Mande-Dyula traders from the north.

By the beginning of the 18th century the power of Denkyera had been crushed, and in the next 70 years Asante armies went on to build up an empire that in the north engulfed Bono and Gonja (Guang) and levied tribute on Dagomba and in the south incorporated or made tributary virtually all the small states that had been involved in the rise of Denkyera, Akyem, and Akwamu. The only part of modern Ghana that was not under the sway of Kumasi was the central coastlands, where the small Fanti (Fante) states, gaining some measure of protection from their close association with the various European forts, began to come together in a federation to resist Asante influence.

The southward expansion of Oyo

As the Atlantic trade began to expand east of the Gold Coast to the Slave Coast, similar political developments began to manifest themselves in its hinterland also (seePrincipal kingdoms and peoples of western Africa, 17th–19th century.From J. Fage, An Atlas of African History; Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.). Toward the end of the 17th century the northernmost Yoruba kingdom, Oyo, began to turn away from its traditional rivalry with the adjacent savanna kingdoms of Nupe and Borgu and to use its cavalry to assert control of the trade routes through the open country southwestward to the small Aja states on the coast in which the Europeans had established trading posts. A measure of control was also asserted more directly to the south over other Yoruba peoples and kings in the forest. Here a boundary was established with the kingdom of Benin, which in the later 17th century decided that it was in its interests to open up its ports to European merchants and to sell slaves to them to secure a share of the goods they were offering.

By the early 18th century strains caused by the virulent competition between the European traders and their African associates were leading to the dissolution of traditional social and political controls among the Aja, who had a number of small kingdoms under the nominal leadership of the king of Allada. The resultant disorder was not to the liking of the kings of Dahomey, the youngest of these monarchies, who, in colonizing the northern marches of Aja territory, had evolved much more authoritarian and militant forms of government and society. Between 1724 and 1734, Dahomey enforced its concepts on the other Aja peoples by conquest and began to build up a centralized state to control the entire Slave Coast.

Initially Dahomey, wishing to conserve labour, was reluctant to sell slaves to the Europeans. This was not to the liking of Oyo, whose foreign trade was dependent on its being able to sell slaves to the Europeans on the Slave Coast. Nor was it really in the long-term interests of the centralized trading system of the Dahoman kings themselves, for these had little but slaves to offer in return for the guns and other goods they needed to buy from the Europeans. From 1726 to 1748 the consequence was continual warfare on the Slave Coast, the ultimate results of which were that Dahomey was led by force of arms to recognize Oyo suzerainty and that the slave trade became firmly established, both under strict royal control in Dahomey’s port of Whydah (Ouidah) and, increasingly, in ports beyond its control to the east, such as Badagri and Lagos.

The armies of Denkyera, Akwamu, Asante, and Dahomey all made use of firearms, and Akwamu seems to have been a pioneer in the development of tactics suited to the new weapons. The Portuguese had not imported guns into western Africa on any scale and as a matter of policy had sold them only to their allies. In the highly competitive trading situation that followed the Dutch breaking of the Portuguese monopoly, all the European trading nations vied with each other to sell guns, and they soon became an essential article of trade.

The muskets exported to western Africa were cheap varieties specially made for the African market. They were undoubtedly serviceable for hunting and for the protection of crops from the depredations of birds and wild animals, but it is debatable how significant their acquisition was in the rise of the new Guinea kingdoms of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is notable, for instance, that Oyo’s military victories were attributed to its employment of cavalry and that it was consistently successful against Dahomey, whose soldiers were equipped with muskets.

From the African point of view, guns were expensive—though less perhaps to buy than to keep in working order and supplied with powder. In this respect, guns were not dissimilar to horses and, like horses, they became the particular prerogative of kings and their henchmen, symbols of prestige but also elements in the growth of royal power at the expense both of subjects and of unfortunate neighbouring peoples who did not evolve state systems. It followed that the trade in firearms—and also in those African exports, such as slaves and gold, which were most in demand by the European sellers of firearms—tended to be under strict royal control. Similarly, competition to secure supplies of guns and ammunition—as of horses in the Sudan—and to deny such supplies to rivals was a factor of some significance in the new era of power politics in Guinea.

By the 18th century the kingdoms and empires of Guinea, especially those of Lower Guinea, though commonly less extensive, were as powerful as those that had been established in the western Sudan. As with the latter, control of trade with the outside world had been an important element in the growth of these states. However, the relationships between the growth of trade and the growth of states in the two systems, those of Guinea and of the Sudan, were not entirely identical. The rise of the Guinea states, for instance, was associated with a growth of trade that was particularly dependent on the growth of a demand for one particular African export, slaves. Any cessation of this demand was therefore likely to create strains for the Guinea states; and Asante, Dahomey, and Oyo had hardly established paramountcies in their areas when Europeans began seriously to question both the morality and the economic value of slave labour.

It is also noteworthy that the Guinea peoples did not generally establish networks of itinerant traders extending far beyond their homelands, as the Mande and Hausa had done. The Asante, Dahomey, and Benin trading systems seem essentially to have been state corporations operating under royal control or license only within the boundaries of their political influence. The northern limits of the Guinea trading system hardly extended more than 300 miles from the coast. Conversely, Mande–Dyula and Hausa traders had ventured far beyond the political and military limits of their kings’ authority (which, in the case of the Hausa, were always very restricted). Even after the rise of the Atlantic trade and of the Guinea kingdoms, traders from the north continued to be of prime importance to the commerce of Guinea and, sometimes, to its political life. The community of Muslim northerners settled in Kumasi, for example, sometimes played a significant role in Asante politics, and the northern trade also led to Islam gaining important ground among the Yoruba. Thus the Guinea states were also likely to be affected by any important changes in the political and economic life of the western Sudan.

The Islamic revolution in the western Sudan

The Moroccan occupation of the Niger Bend in 1591 meant that the domination of the western Sudan by Mande or Mande-inspired empires—Ghana, Mali, Songhai—which had persisted for at least five centuries, was at last ended. The Songhai kings were pushed southeast into their original homeland of Dendi, farther down the Niger close to Borgu, and Mande political power was limited to the so-called Bambara—i.e., “pagan”—kingdoms of Segu (Ségou) and, later, of Kaarta, upstream and to the west of Macina. In and around the Niger Bend itself, the long-term effect of the Moroccan conquest was to open up the country to the Tuareg and Arabized Amazigh tribes of the Saharan fringes. By the middle of the 18th century the descendants of the Moroccan conquerors, who had settled down in the Niger Bend cities as a ruling caste, the Arma, had become tributary to the desert pastoralists.

The same tribes operated, or at least profited from, the trans-Saharan trade, and some of them had acquired leading positions in western African Islam. The Kunta tribe of Arabized Imazighen had become preeminent in both these respects by the 18th century. It dominated the salt trade to Timbuktu, and in the person of Sīdī Mukhtār (died 1811) it had produced a spiritual leader so respected among the Muslims of the western Sudan that the Kunta were able to exercise on the quarrels between the pastoral tribes a mediating influence which was clearly to the general benefit of commerce and urban society.

Mukhtār’s position was due to qualities of learning and holiness that were in part personal but also in large measure due to his leading role in the Qādirīyah, one of the Muslim brotherhoods (tariqas) in which particular traditions of both sanctity and learning were passed on from teacher to teacher. These brotherhoods or religious orders had arisen with the growth, from about the 11th century onward, of mystical currents of Muslim thought (especially in eastern Islam, where the Qādirīyah had begun). Mysticism proved to be congenial to Amazigh society in North Africa (where the Tijānīyah order evolved in the 18th century), and from there the tariqa entered the Sahara, arriving in western Africa by the beginning of the 16th century.

Hitherto Islam had been spread in western Africa essentially by merchants who, in order to secure their livelihood, chose to accommodate themselves and their religion within the pagan social and political framework that existed where they settled—which for the most part was only in the towns. But with the coming of the tariqa—of which the Qādirīyah was one of the first and, until the Tijānīyah began to advance in its tracks in the 19th century, certainly the foremost—western Africa began to experience the growth of organized groups of devout Muslims who were both specifically trained and morally compelled to work toward a true Islāmic society. Moreover, if the people and their rulers remained irresponsive or hostile, it was the Muslims’ duty to preach the doctrine of conversion by force, through the jihad, divinely justified war or rebellion against rulers who were pagans or not true Muslims.

This doctrine was particularly attractive to the Fulani, who, as has been seen, were scattered in stranger communities between the agricultural settlements throughout the western African savannas. As the wealth, organization, and power of agricultural and urban society increased, so there was less scope available for the free movement of the Fulani cattle and less freedom for their herdsmen. The Fulani were subject to increased pressures to pay rents, taxes, and services to the rulers of the settled communities who, from the Fulani point of view, were aliens who had no natural right to these things. Although the bulk of the Fulani were pagans, they were, as pastoralists, naturally open to influence from the Saharan pastoralists who were Muslims and among whom the tariqa had been established. The Fulani also had ethnic links with the long Islamized Tukulor of the far west, and they had a considerable and influential Muslim clerical class of their own. The Fulani clerics were thus particularly receptive to the doctrine of jihad and, throughout the Sudan, could ally themselves with considerable numbers of disgruntled and mobile pastoral kinsmen to make jihad a military reality.

The first Fulani jihad

The earliest known Fulani jihad occurred in Bondu (see ), close to the Islamized Sénégal valley, where in the second half of the 17th century Fulani clerics succeeded in taking over political power from local Mande rulers. Early in the following century, considerable numbers of Fulani began to do the same in alliance with the local Muslim Mande traders in the nearby Fouta Djallon. By about 1750 a Muslim theocracy had been erected whose leaders were soon engaged in organizing trade to the Upper Guinea coast on which European traders were active. In the second half of the 18th century the same pattern was repeated in the Fouta-Toro (now Fouta), the homeland of the Tukulor, for there, though the dispossessed rulers were Muslims, as a group they were too self-interested and exploitative to suit the clerics.

News of these developments in the westernmost Sudan naturally spread through the Fulani diaspora to more easterly territories influenced by the teaching of Sīdī Mukhtār and other like-minded tariqa divines. In 1804 the most famous of the western African jihads was launched in Hausaland by Usman dan Fodio.

Usman was the leading Fulani cleric in Gobir, the northernmost and most militant of the Hausa kingdoms (see ). This was in a disturbed state in the 17th and 18th centuries. The growth of Tuareg power in Aïr on its northern frontiers had led the Gobir ruling class to seek compensation to the south and southwest, in the territories of Zamfara and Kebbi. There the breakup of the Songhai empire had led to a power vacuum, which had been an encouragement to Fulani settlement. The kings of Gobir, like other Hausa monarchs, were at least nominally Muslims, and for a time Usman had been employed at their court. He then used the influence he had gained to develop a Muslim community of his own, some miles away from the capital, governed according to the strict principles of law preached by the Qādirīyah. The kings of Gobir gradually came to the conclusion that they could not afford to tolerate this independent jurisdiction within their unsettled kingdom and began to take steps against the Muslim community. By 1804 the situation became such that Usman felt he had no alternative but to declare a jihad and to adopt the role of an independent Muslim ruler (amīr al-muʾminīn or, in Hausa, sarkin musulmi).

Both sides appealed for wider support. While the Hausa kings proved incapable of concerted action against the movement of Islamic rebellion, discontented Fulani and oppressed Hausa peasantry throughout Hausaland welcomed the opportunity to rid themselves of vexatious overlords and arbitrary taxation. Within three years almost all the Hausa kings had been replaced by Fulani emirs who acknowledged the supreme authority of Usman. The most serious fighting was in and around Gobir itself, where the maintenance of large Fulani forces in the field alienated the local peasantry. Fortresses had to be established for the systematic reduction of the country, and in the process the old kingdom of Gobir was destroyed and two major military encampments, Sokoto and Gwandu, eventually emerged as the twin capitals of a new Fulani empire.

The core of this empire was composed of the three large former kingdoms of Katsina, Kano, and Zaria (Zegzeg), in which, together with the smaller former kingdom of Daura, a Fulani aristocracy had taken over the Hausa system of government and had brought it into line with the principles of Islam as stated by Usman. But the jihad had not stopped at their boundaries. Hausa clerics and adventurers joined with the Fulani in creating new Muslim emirates farther afield, among the pagan and hitherto largely stateless peoples of the Bauchi highlands, for example, and in the open grasslands of northern Cameroon, where there were large numbers of Fulani. There the vast new emirate of Adamawa was created. In the south Fulani and Hausa clerics intervened in a succession dispute in the old pagan kingdom of Nupe and by 1856 had converted it into a new emirate ruled from Bida. There had also been considerable Fulani and Muslim penetration into northern Yorubaland, and, in about 1817, its governor rashly invoked Fulani and Hausa aid in his rebellion against the king of Oyo. The governor’s new allies took over, the new emirate of Ilorin was created, and the disintegration of the Oyo empire was accelerated.

The only serious check to Fulani conquest was in Bornu. By 1808 the forces of Fulani rebellion and invasion had reduced its ancient monarchy to impotence. Bornu and Kanem, however, had their own clerical class and tradition, and in the latter province arose a new leader, Muḥammad al-Kānemī, who asserted that the Fulani clerics did not have a unique right to interpret Muslim law for the government of humanity. Al-Kānemī was able to inspire a spirited national resistance, which by 1811 had turned the tide against the Fulani. By 1826 he was the effective master of a new Islamic state, though the traditional kings were maintained in office until 1846, when the puppet of the time rebelled against al-Kānemī’s son and successor, ʿUmar, but was defeated and killed.

Usman dan Fodio was a scholar and theologian who had little inclination for the political and military direction of the movement he had inspired. His main role was to maintain the jihad’s spiritual and moral force and direction, and he left a remarkable memorial of this in his innumerable writings. The practical commanders of the jihad were his brother, Abdullahi, and his son, Muḥammad Bello, who were men of action as well as considerable scholars. These two eventually became joint viceroys of the new empire, Bello ruling its eastern half from Sokoto and Abdullahi the western half from a seat of government at Gwandu. They oversaw the installations of the provincial emirs, received tribute from them, and endeavoured to ensure that their governments and systems of taxation followed the principles of Muslim law and were not arbitrary and extortionate. Gradually the original scholarly and clerical impulse of the jihad weakened (though it was never wholly forgotten), and the emirs tended to become more representative of the military Fulani aristocracy, which tended to intermarry into the old Hausa ruling class. Standards of scholarship decayed and Hausa, rather than Arabic, became the language of administration. But for half a century or more after the jihad, some 200,000 square miles of territory enjoyed a unified system of relatively impartial law and administration, and this was much to the advantage of its agriculture, industry, and trade.

Both Sokoto and Gwandu were in the extreme northwest of the empire, where the jihad had had its origins and where it continued longest, for Kebbi was never entirely subdued. It is possible also that it was in this direction, looking up the Niger toward the Kunta and to the considerable Fulani population of Macina, that it was thought that there might be further advances. Doubtless it was for these reasons that Abdullahi settled at Gwandu with responsibility for the western empire. The main Fulani successes, however, were to the southeast in Bello’s sphere, and it was Bello who in 1817 succeeded to his father’s titles of caliph and sarkin musulmi.

When, about 1818, a jihad began in Macina, it was an independent movement led by a local Qādirī Fulani, Ahmadu ibn Hammadi. Ahmadu was certainly cognizant of Usman’s jihad, and the circumstances in which his own movement was born were very similar to those that had occasioned the jihad in Hausaland. Ahmadu established an independent Muslim community that brought him into conflict with his local, pagan Fulani chief, who was unwise enough to call for help from his suzerain, the Bambara king of Segu. The result was a general rising under Ahmadu that established a theocratic Muslim Fulani state throughout Macina and extended to both the ancient Muslim centres of Jenne (Djenné) and Timbuktu.

The jihad of ʾUmar Tal

The third major western African jihad of the 19th century was that of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal (c. 1797–1864), a Tukulor cleric from the Fouta-Toro (see ). As a young man, ʿUmar went on the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca (hence the honorific al-Ḥājj), and in all spent some 20 years away from his homeland. Twelve of these were spent at Sokoto, where he married a daughter of Bello’s. He also spent some time with al-Kānemī in Bornu, and he shared with both men in the great revival of Muslim scholarship in the western Sudan. But ʿUmar had a wider experience of the Muslim world than either Bello or al-Kānemī, and he must have been acquainted with both the modernism of Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha’s regime in Egypt and the new puritanism of the Wahhābīyah in Arabia. Also while in Arabia he seems to have been appointed the western African caliph of the relatively new Tijānīyah brotherhood, which was appreciably more activist in its demand for reform than the Qādirīyah. About 1838 ʿUmar arrived home in the Fouta-Toro, where he quickly became estranged from the local clerics. In 1848 he moved away with such followers as he had to Dinguiraye, on the borders of the Fouta Djallon. There he built up a community of his own, attracting and training military and commercial adventurers as well as religious reformers. His community traded with the Upper Guinea coast for firearms and was consciously conceived as the nucleus for a new state. In 1852 the Dinguiraye community came into conflict with the adjacent Bambara chiefs. A jihad was launched northward through the gold-bearing valleys across the upper Sénégal, where in 1854 the Bambara kingdom of Kaarta fell. ʿUmar then turned west down the Sénégal toward his own homeland and the French trading posts. But he was repulsed by the French, and after 1859 he sought to join with the Fulani of Macina in the conquest of the more powerful Bambara kingdom of Segu. The Macina Fulani were opposed to the idea of a Tijānī power advancing into their own Qādirī zone in the Niger valley and even gave some aid to Segu. After ʿUmar’s forces had conquered Segu in 1861, they continued eastward, and, finding that Ahmadu’s somewhat autocratic and intolerant regime had estranged the longer established Muslim communities, they established ʿUmar’s hegemony as far as Timbuktu (1863).

In less than 10 years al-Ḥājj ʿUmar’s armies had conquered an empire almost as large as that of the Sokoto Fulani. It does not, however, appear to have been as well founded. Outside of the Niger valley and the major trading settlements, the majority of its inhabitants were basically pagans who had only accepted Islam because they had been subjected to the shock of conquest by comparatively small bodies of well-armed and well-led adventurers. This was a different situation from that in which relatively large numbers of Muslim Fulani and Hausa had poured out from the old Hausa states into territories already prepared for them by the infiltration of Islam and the presence of Hausa traders and Fulani settlers. In ʿUmar’s empire individual captains, exempt from taxation themselves, settled down to exploit their conquests as virtually independent fiefs. Along the Niger axis of empire there were both old, established Muslim towns and Fulani communities whose inhabitants regarded the Tijānī Tukulor as upstarts. In 1864 ʿUmar was killed attempting to suppress a Fulani rebellion in Macina, and for many years his son and successor, Aḥmadu Seku (died 1898), had to compete for his inheritance with his father’s numerous other relations and captains.

The most important result of ʿUmar’s conquests was that they established the Tijānīyah as the most powerful tariqa in western African Islam, and this, together with the earlier consolidation of Muslim power in the east under Sokoto, ultimately ensured that Islam became the dominant religion throughout the western Sudan, and one capable of peaceful expansion deep into Guinea. Already circumstances had changed, however, since the Fulani cavaliers had built up the Sokoto Muslim empire. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar’s empire builders relied on horses for their mobility, but they were also musketeers who knew the value of trade with the Europeans at the coast. Even more significantly, they had already come into conflict with, and had been worsted by, European military and political power advancing inland from the coast.

The Guinea coastlands and the Europeans (1807–79)

In addition to the Islamic revolution in the Sudan, the major themes of western African history in the 19th century are the successful campaign against the export of slaves, the trade that for the previous 200 years had been the mainstay of Guinea commerce; the search by both Africans and Europeans for a stable new relationship in the absence of slave trading; and the failure of the major African kingdoms to adjust to the new economic and social circumstances swiftly enough to withstand growing European pressures.

These three themes are closely interwoven in the course of events in Africa. It should be noted, however, that the major decisions regarding the abolition of the slave trade were taken outside Africa and were responses to economic and political changes and pressures in Europe and America. Many of the Christian churches had never accepted the morality of trading in human beings, and the 18th-century Evangelical movements in Protestant Europe led to open campaigning against the Atlantic slave trade and also against the institution of slavery itself. These things were equally condemned by new secular currents of thought associated with the French Revolution. Because plantation production in tropical America was no longer as profitable a field for investment by northern Europeans as industry, or as trade with other parts of the world, the propaganda against the slave trade began to take effect. Denmark outlawed slave trading by its citizens in 1803, Great Britain in 1807, the United States in 1808, Sweden in 1813, the Netherlands in 1814, and France (for the second time) in 1818.

The most significant of these actions against the slave trade was that of Britain. British ships had been by far the largest carriers of slaves at the end of the 18th century, and only Britain really possessed the naval resources necessary to secure enforcement of anti-slave-trade laws on the high seas. Furthermore, when Portugal, Spain, and some American countries expanded their slave trading to meet the deficiency caused by the British withdrawal, they met with strong opposition from Britain. The underlying reason for this was that Britain, more than any other European nation, had considerable amounts of capital, experience, and goodwill accumulated in trade with Africa. When British merchants tried to develop new lines in African trade to replace their old slave trade, however, they commonly found that, as long as their European or American rivals continued to buy slaves, African kings and merchants were generally not willing to organize alternative exports. Economic interest therefore combined with abstract morality to induce successive British governments to bring pressure on other governments to outlaw their slave trades and to permit the British navy to help enforce their laws on their ships at sea.

But these measures did not stop the export of slaves from Africa. Some nations, notably France and the United States, whose own naval controls were fitful, objected strongly to British warships stopping, searching, and, if need be, arresting their ships at sea. Furthermore, as long as there was a market for slaves in the Americas (i.e., until all the American countries had abolished the institution of slavery), there were lawless individual traders who felt that the profits to be gained from running slaves across the Atlantic more than outweighed the risk of arrest. Except when actually embarking slaves on the African coast or unloading them in American waters, the chances of interception at sea were in fact quite small. Although the British navy maintained in western African waters an anti-slave-trade squadron of up to 20 ships, which between 1825 and 1865 arrested 1,287 slave ships and liberated about 130,000 slaves, during the same period about 1.8 million African slaves are believed to have been landed in the Americas.

The final cessation of the export of slaves from Africa to the Americas took place toward the end of the 1860s. The decisive factor was the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865. Slavery was then legal only in Cuba and Brazil—and only to the 1880s—and the risks of transporting slaves to these two markets became too high. Before this, British governments had already embarked on a policy of taking or supporting active steps in Africa to stop slaves from being offered for sale on its coasts and to encourage the production of alternative exports. The immediate results of these efforts were often not very great. For example, many African governments and merchants were no more inclined than many European or American governments or merchants to enforce or to observe the anti-slave-trade treaties that British officials wished upon them. They saw no reason why their economic interests, which were bound up with slavery and trade in slaves, should be subordinated to the new economic interests of British traders following what was to them the capricious decision that slavery and the slave trade were wrong.

The British presence in Sierra Leone

What was significant was that Britain, through its desire to stop the export of slaves from western Africa and to protect the interests of British merchants desiring to trade in other commodities, maintained a substantial naval presence in western Africa and was also acquiring new political, commercial, and missionary presences. These led to increasing interference in the domestic affairs of African societies and their governments.

This interference began with the British naval squadron’s need of shore stations to serve as bases for its patrolling ships and as landing places for the appreciable numbers of slaves it was intercepting. The slave ships had to be taken to a European jurisdiction to be condemned, and the slaves they had carried could not simply be returned to the societies that had sold them, but needed to be maintained as wards for whom Britain accepted political and moral responsibilities. British political officers and missionaries therefore became established on African soil, and the area of their activities was continually increasing. Explorers were penetrating the hinterland in search of new avenues for trade. British traders were competing with the slave traders. The liberated Africans were branching out into trade for themselves or simply returning home with new Western and Christian attitudes. All these were apt to ask for political or missionary support, and, behind this, naval action could be called upon if there were difficulties with the local African rulers.

For the greater part of the 19th century the prime centre for British naval, political, and missionary activities on the western African coast was Sierra Leone. Toward the end of the 18th century the Sierra Leone peninsula had been chosen by British philanthropists as a suitable place to which Africans who had been taken to Britain as slaves and freed there, or who had fought on the British side in the American Revolution, might be repatriated. A first group was sent out and settled on the site of the future Freetown in 1787. Although many of the early settlers did not survive, others were brought, and by 1811 Freetown had a liberated African population of about 2,000.

After a first false start, the philanthropists hoped to find funds for the maintenance of their settlement by placing it under the control of a company they had floated to trade with the interior. But the only trade that prospered in the Sierra Leone region was the slave trade, in which the company naturally did not engage, and after 1799, their colony, whose indeterminate constitutional status caused many difficulties, was able to survive only with the help of annual grants-in-aid from the British government. Eventually, in 1808, the British government agreed to take over direct responsibility for the colony from the Sierra Leone Company.

Freetown was not the only British settlement on the western African coast. Officials of a descendant of the old African Company of slave trading days still occupied a number of forts on the Gold Coast and one in the Gambia, and these were now meant to provide support for British merchants engaged in other trades. In 1817, after the settlements on the Sénégal, which had been in British hands during the Napoleonic Wars, had been handed back to France, a considerable number of British traders and their African associates moved to the mouth of the Gambia River and established there the new settlement of Bathurst (Banjul). Neither the Gambia nor the Gold Coast were exclusive British spheres, however. The French were strong competitors on the former, and both the Dutch and the Danes still held forts on the latter, and where European interests were divided, there was no certainty that the British settlements would prosper in competition with slave traders, nor that they could be developed as effective bases in an active campaign against that trade.

From 1808, however, British policy required that such a base be maintained in western Africa, and Freetown was the obvious choice. It had one of the best natural harbours on the coast, and it was already experienced in the resettlement of liberated slaves. Christian missions had begun to establish themselves there since 1806, and it became the seat of a British governor and of anti-slave-trade courts and the headquarters of the navy’s western African squadron. During the next 60 years this squadron was to swell the population under British rule by landing some 60,000 men and women, from all over western Africa, whom it had taken from arrested slave ships. Freetown’s only serious disadvantage was that it was at one end of the slave-exporting coast. In 1827, therefore, the British navy also began to use the island of Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea as an alternative base and freed-slave settlement. But this activity aroused the interest of the Spanish government, which had had a legal claim to the island since 1778, and in 1834 the settlement was abandoned.

From 1814 to 1824 the British governor and commander in chief at Freetown was Sir Charles M’Carthy, an active military man who thought that the most effective means of achieving Britain’s aims in western Africa was to extend its formal dominion over the most vexatious outlets for the slave trade. The home government for a time countenanced this policy and in 1821 transferred the forts on the Gambia and Gold Coast to M’Carthy’s administration. During the 10 years of his government its expenditure quadrupled to nearly $400,000 a year. There was no corresponding increase in British trade (nor any diminution of the slave trade), however, with the result that the cost had to be met by British taxpayers who were antagonistic to spending money on colonies. In 1824 M’Carthy’s forward policy led him to make common cause with the Fanti against Asante claims to overlordship on the Gold Coast. In the war that followed, however, he was defeated and killed, and the British government decided that it should withdraw from all formal commitments in western Africa except at Sierra Leone.

The British in the Niger delta

In fact the most prosperous British trade was developing on a part of the coast on which there was no British interference other than naval action to intercept slave ships and to secure anti-slave-trade treaties. That was the Niger delta. British shipping had been paramount there when the British slave trade had been abolished in 1807, and the merchants of the delta city-states had quickly adapted themselves to offering palm oil as an alternative export to slaves.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution had occasioned a growing demand for vegetable oils as lubricants and for the manufacture of soap, and the new Lancashire cotton industry was producing in quantity a commodity with which palm oil might readily be purchased. By the 1830s the British purchases of palm oil in western Africa were worth nearly $2 million a year. About nine-tenths of this trade was initially with the Niger delta. The oil palm grows throughout a belt just behind the western African coast, and the oil from its fruit was already widely consumed and traded locally. Africans of the delta were much quicker and more successful in developing an export trade in palm oil than were those of other coastal regions. One reason was simply that the oil was not easy to transport in quantity, and its value was not high in proportion to its bulk. Canoe transport was thus easier and cheaper than headloading or cask rolling, and the delta afforded a ready-made system of waterways. But its hinterland also had an unusually dense population in a relatively poor agricultural environment and therefore had both a greater need to exploit the semiwild palm trees than was usually the case and more labour with which to do this and to manufacture and transport the oil. Moreover, the collection of the fruit and the manufacture of the oil were traditional household activities, and to exploit these for export necessitated a commercial system that was both wide and intensive and, in addition, highly responsive and flexible.

The small, highly competitive city-states of the Niger delta, built up and ruled by merchants, could exploit the overseas demand for palm oil much more quickly and efficiently than was possible elsewhere. In Liberia and western Côte d’Ivoire, for example, the trading network, like the population, was thin and little advanced. Elsewhere export trading (for example, in slaves or gold) had been directed, or at least controlled, by large-scale organizations that were less flexible, politically motivated, and much less responsive to commercial changes; among these were the traditional political hierarchies of large kingdoms such as Benin, Asante, and Dahomey, or the new politico-religious administrations of the Fouta Djallon or of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar. It may be noted, incidentally, that the successful development of palm-oil exports from Yorubaland followed upon the collapse of the Oyo empire there. It was not until about the 1860s, when the total British purchases of palm oil were worth about $6 million a year, that exports from the rest of western Africa, with Yorubaland in the vanguard, began to equal those of the Niger delta.

British official policy toward western Africa remained one of minimum intervention until the 1870s. Indeed, the view that Britain should withdraw from all commitments other than in Sierra Leone was most forcefully asserted by a Parliamentary Select Committee as late as 1865. In fact, however, both positive and negative results of the active British campaign against the Atlantic slave trade made it impossible for the policy of nonintervention to be maintained in practice.

The growth of the spirit of European scientific inquiry during the 18th and 19th centuries combined with a practical interest in finding out what Africa produced besides slaves that could be of value to world trade and what political, economic, and transport systems existed to permit such products to be brought down to the coast, to lead to a great movement of European exploration of the interior of western Africa between 1788 and 1855. This movement was primarily directed from Britain, and from 1805 the British government sponsored many of the major expeditions.

These explorations suggested a possible strategy of breaking through the barrier of the established slave-trading states at the coast by using the Niger River to trade directly with the interior. This seemed attractive after the rejection of the M’Carthy policy of positive coastal action, and from 1832 onward the British government sponsored or helped to sponsor a number of expeditions designed to develop navigation up the Niger. By 1854 quinine and the steamship had solved the technical problems of navigating the lower river, but a new political problem had been created in the objections of both black and white traders in the delta to their established trading system being bypassed in this way.

The fall of the African kingdoms

By the middle of the century the development of the liberated African community in Sierra Leone under the tutelage of British administration, churches, and education meant that some of its members were providing a considerable reinforcement for the British interest in western Africa. Economic activities in Sierra Leone itself were limited, and Sierra Leoneans were soon finding their way along the coast as independent pioneers of trade and Westernization or as auxiliaries to British traders, officials, and missionaries. Their most significant influence was in Yorubaland. By the 1840s at least half the liberated Africans were of Yoruba extraction, and by this time their homeland afforded considerable scope both for independent traders and for people seeking to introduce Christian and Western ideas and ways into African life. Both these circumstances derived from the failure of the Oyo empire in the 18th century to establish a stable form of central government capable of maintaining a firm control over the provinces it had conquered. There remained a dangerously uncertain balance of power between the king and the traditional chiefs of the capital.

Such a situation was by no means unique in the history of the kingdoms of Guinea (or, for that matter, of western Africa). Dahomey seems to have avoided it only because its kings, initiating their kingdom through the conquest of peoples who were not of their own stock, had been able to build up an unusually authoritarian form of government. But in both Benin and Asante traditional kinship organizations imposed restraints on royal authority, and tensions could develop when it came to sharing the rewards of empire and trade. There was a near disastrous civil war at Benin at the end of the 17th century, though the king emerged from it with his authority strengthened, apparently because he was able to play off the town chiefs against the chiefs of his palace. Asante had come into being as an alliance of petty kingdoms against Denkyera, and its kings, desiring to be more than merely primus inter pares, began by entrusting the new kingdom’s conquests mainly to the chiefs of their capital, Kumasi. But the chiefs then sought to control the monarch, and the latter had to turn for help from the provincial rulers to release him from this situation. Ultimately, however, from the time of Osei Kojo (c. 1764–77), the kings secured their preeminence throughout the kingdom by building up a new hierarchical military and civil administration, which was responsible uniquely to them and which limited the power of both sets of chiefs.

At Oyo the traditional town chiefs, who commanded the army of the capital, converted the kings into puppets during the 1750s and ’60s. About 1774 they gave the throne to a king, Abiodun, who escaped from their control and used provincial forces to establish royal authority over the capital. After Abiodun’s death (c. 1789), the provincial chiefs began to act with increasing independence. When (c. 1817) the viceroy of the north invited Fulani aid to help consolidate his rebellion, the result was not simply that the kings of Oyo lost their northern provinces to the Fulani; they also lost control over the northern trade routes on which they depended for their vital supplies of horses and slaves, and eventually (c. 1836) they had to evacuate their capital to the south. By this time there was no longer any central authority, and everywhere ambitious men were vying with each other to create personal dominions over as many clients and slaves as possible.

One consequence of this situation was a great increase in the number of slaves available for export from nearby Dahomey, which by 1818 had thrown off the last vestiges of Oyo suzerainty and was soon sending its armies deep into Yorubaland, and from independent traders at ports such as Lagos and Badagri. It was the close attention given by the British navy to these coasts that had led to the build-up of Yoruba former slaves in Sierra Leone. By the 1840s considerable numbers of these people were returning to Lagos and Badagri and, especially, the new inland town of Abeokuta, originally built up as a refuge where Egba (southern Yoruba) peoples could withstand pressures from Ibadan, the most powerful of the new Yoruba political units, and from Dahomey. The advent of the settlers from Sierra Leone soon brought British missionaries, and a new British-aligned influence was added to the tangled web of Yoruba politics.

British officialdom soon followed. In 1848 a British consulate had been established for the Gulf of Guinea to maintain British interests in the complex situation arising from the splintered politics of the Niger delta and the beginnings of navigation on the river itself.

The consuls joined with naval officers in attempts to stop the king of Dahomey from exporting slaves, and, when repulsed, turned to Lagos, where they saw their opportunity in a split in the royal family. In 1851 the British navy restored to his throne a deposed monarch who had promised to stop the Lagos slave trade. He was in fact powerless to do this without continued British support. Lagos became the seat of a second British consulate in 1853, and in 1861 it was annexed. British and Sierra Leonean traders endeavouring to develop palm oil trade with Yorubaland were soon trying to persuade the colonial government at Lagos that only a further advance of its authority into the hinterland would stop its wars and its export of slaves and allow their own affairs to prosper.

The first serious advance of British power in western Africa occurred on the Gold Coast. After the withdrawal of British officials and troops in 1828, the British Gold Coast traders took on a young army officer, George Maclean, to represent their interests there. Maclean negotiated a peace with Asante and established an informal jurisdiction through the coastal states, which brought security for both British and Asante merchants. The consequent fourfold increase in British trade combined with the uncertain legal status of Maclean’s jurisdiction to bring British officials back to the forts in 1843. In 1850 they took over the Danish forts also, but the continued Dutch presence on the coast prevented them from raising an effective revenue from customs duties, and they quarreled with the coastal peoples over the issue of direct taxation. They therefore failed to erect an effective coastal administration of their own on the foundation laid by Maclean, and they equally rejected alternatives proffered by educated Africans in cooperation with the coastal chiefs. Trade declined, and Asante’s armies began to invade the coastlands to protect its interests there. Eventually the Dutch were led to withdraw altogether (1872) and the British to invade Asante and destroy its capital and to declare the whole coast a colony (1874).

Three-quarters of a century of turmoil following the British decision to campaign against the Atlantic slave trade and to foster the interests of legitimate trade and Christian civilization in western Africa had therefore resulted in the establishment of the new colony of Sierra Leone and direct British intervention in African affairs in much of the most prosperous area of the old trade—the Gold Coast, Lagos, and the delta and lower river of the Niger.

African sovereignty had also been infringed between Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast where, inspired by the Sierra Leone example, private U.S organizations had settled freed slaves for whom there was no place in their own society prior to 1863. British and French merchants questioned the right of the settlers to control and to tax their trade and, since formal U.S. policy was anticolonial, the result, in 1847, was the proclamation of the Republic of Liberia. The settler government then embarked on a long struggle to assert control over the local Africans. Because, unlike a colonial government, it had no metropolitan resources or finance to help, this was a prolonged business.

The growth of British trade, and of British influence and power, in western Africa was by no means to the liking of the government, traders, and navy of France—Britain’s principal competitors in the previous century. But France’s mercantile interest in western Africa was not as strong as Britain’s, and its traders there received less official and naval support than did the British. Not until the 1870s and the opening of the European scramble was any serious effort made to develop the trading footholds that were established on the coast between Senegal and Sierra Leone, on the Ivory Coast, and between the Gold Coast and Lagos.

France’s main effort in western Africa was devoted to developing its old interests in Senegal following the British withdrawal in 1817. Initially an attempt was made to replace the former business of exporting labour to the West Indies by developing a local plantation economy. By the 1820s this was foundering, and matters then drifted until the arrival in 1854 of a new governor, Louis Faidherbe, a soldier with experience in the conquest of Algeria and in the government of its peoples. Faidherbe’s concept was to secure control of the exports of the westernmost Sudan by extending French military and political control up the Sénégal River and to encourage local African production of the peanut (groundnut) to help meet the growing French and European demand for vegetable oils. By the time of his departure in 1865, Senegal had become the prototype for subsequent European colonization in western Africa and a springboard from which the French could think of conquering the whole Sudan.

Colonization

The European scramble to partition and occupy African territory is often treated as a peripheral aspect of the political and economic rivalries that developed between the new industrial nations in Europe itself and that were particularly acute from about 1870 to 1914. Its opening has commonly been taken to be either the French reaction to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 or the Congo basin rivalry between agents of France and of Leopold II of the Belgians that led to the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85, both of which are seen as being exploited by Bismarck for purposes of his European policy.

Effect of local conditions

In western Africa, however, it seems fair to say that the beginnings of the scramble and partition were evident at least a generation before the 1880s and that they were determined by the local situation as much as or more than they were by European domestic rivalries. Already during 1854–74, the logic of the situation in western Africa had led France and Britain to take the political initiatives of creating formal European colonies in Senegal, in Lagos, and in the Gold Coast. All along the coast, in fact, the traditional African political order was becoming ineffective in the face of European economic and social pressures. For most of the 19th century these pressures had been predominantly British, but in the 1870s French companies began to offer effective competition to the British traders not only in Upper Guinea, where they had always been strong, but also on the Ivory Coast, in the ports immediately to the west of Lagos, and even in the lower river and delta of the Niger. An unstable situation was developing in which the European traders were likely to call for further intervention and support from their governments, and especially so if the terms of trade were to turn against them. Low world prices for primary produce during the depression years from the 1870s to the mid-1890s certainly caused difficulties for Europeans trading to western Africa and led them to think that an increase in European control there would enable them to secure its produce more cheaply.

The changing balance of power in western Africa was not confined to the coastlands. By the 1870s formal French and British armies had already ventured into the interior and had inflicted defeats on such major African powers as those of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar and Asante. In 1879 Faidherbe’s heirs on the Sénégal River had launched the thrust that was to take French arms conquering eastward across the Sudan to Lake Chad and beyond.

By the end of the 1870s France and Britain, therefore, were already on the march in western Africa. The principal effect of the new forces stemming from domestic power rivalries in Europe itself—the most dramatic of which was the appearance in 1884 of the German flag on the Togoland coast, between the Gold Coast and Dahomey, and in the Cameroons—was to intensify and to accelerate existing French and British tendencies to exert their political and military authority at the expense of traditional African rulers.

French areas of interest

There can be no question but that, by the end of the 1870s, the advance of the British interest in western Africa had been more rewarding than the advance of the French interest. Devoting their attention primarily to the active economies of the Niger delta, the Lagos hinterland, and the Gold Coast, British traders had secured $24 million of business a year, compared with the French merchants’ trade of $8 million, three-quarters of which was concentrated on the Sénégal River. Initially, therefore, the French had much more incentive for expansion than the British.

Britain was already in political control of the Gold Coast, and the arrival of the German treaty makers in Togo and in the Cameroons in 1884 hastened it to declare its protectorate over most of the intervening coastline on which British traders were active. The gap left between Lagos and Togo was swiftly filled by the French, and from 1886 they also established formal authority over all other parts of the coastline that were not already claimed by the governments of Liberia, Portugal, or Britain. In this way the baselines were established from which France subsequently developed the colonies of Dahomey, the Ivory Coast, and French Guinea.

France’s advance inland from these southern coasts was subsidiary, however, to the main thrust, which was eastward from the Sénégal region through the Sudan. The glamour of its past had persuaded the French that the Sudan was the most advanced, most populated, and most productive zone of western Africa. Once they had reached the upper Niger from the Sénégal (1879–83), the French forces had a highway permitting them further rapid advances. By 1896 they had linked up with the troops that had conquered Dahomey (1893–94) to threaten the lower Niger territories which British traders had penetrated from the delta.

British areas of interest

The rapid French advance across western Africa from the Sénégal River had denied the British any chance of exploiting the commercial hinterland of the Gambia River and had severely restricted their opportunities from Sierra Leone. Government and mercantile interests nonetheless were able to agree on the need for British action to keep the French (and also the Germans from Togo and from the Cameroons) out of the hinterlands of the Gold Coast, Lagos, and the Niger delta. Asante submitted to an ultimatum in 1896 (the real war of conquest was delayed until 1900–01, when the British had to suppress a widespread rebellion against their authority), and a British protectorate was extended northward to the limits of Asante influence.

On the Niger, British interests were first maintained by an amalgamation of trading companies formed in 1879 by Sir George Goldie to combat French commercial competition. In 1897 the British government agreed to support Goldie’s Royal Niger Company in the development of military forces. Three years later, however, it recognized the foolishness of allowing the company’s servants and soldiers to compete for African territory with French government officials and troops and to enforce its monopolistic policies on all other traders within its sphere. The company was divested of its political role, and the British government itself took over direct responsibility for the conquest of most of the Sokoto empire. Thus, although the French eventually reached Lake Chad, they were kept to the southern edges of the Sahara, and most of the well-populated Hausa agricultural territory became the British protectorate of Northern Nigeria. In 1914 this was merged with the Yoruba territories, which had been entered from Lagos during the 1890s, and with the protectorate over the Niger delta region to constitute a single Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria.

Claims of territorial boundaries

As early as 1898 Europeans had staked out colonies over all western Africa except for some 40,000 square miles of territory left to the Republic of Liberia (seeEuropean penetration into western Africa in the late 19th century.From J. Fage, An Atlas of African History; Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.). Portugal had taken virtually no active part in the scramble, and its once extensive influence was now confined within the 14,000 square miles that became the colony of Portuguese Guinea. Germany, the latecomer, had claimed the 33,000 square miles of Togo (together with the much larger Cameroon territory on the eastern borders of what is usually accepted as western Africa). France and Britain remained, as before, the main imperial powers.

France claimed by far the larger amount of territory, nearly 1.8 million square miles compared with some 450,000 square miles in the four enclaves secured by Britain. In other terms, however, France had done less well. Its territory included a large part of the Sahara, and the three inland colonies of French Sudan (modern Mali), Upper Volta (modern Burkina Faso), and Niger were by and large scantily populated and, because of their remoteness from the coast, were contributing little or nothing to the world economy. In 1897 the trade of the four British colonies was worth about $24 million, compared with about $14 million for the seven French territories, and their combined population of more than 20 million was more than twice as great.

The political boundaries established by the Europeans by 1898 (though usually not surveyed or demarcated on the ground until much later) largely determine the political map of western Africa today. The only subsequent change of significance followed the British and French conquests of the German colonies during World War I (1914–18). While the larger parts of both Togo and Cameroon were entrusted by the League of Nations to the French to administer as separate colonies, in each case a smaller western part was entrusted to Britain to be administered together with the Gold Coast and Nigeria respectively. Ultimately British Togo chose to join with the Gold Coast and so became part of the new independent Ghana. The northern part of British Cameroon similarly joined with Nigeria, but the southern part chose instead to federate with the former French Cameroon.

Problems of military control

If 20 years had sufficed for the European powers to partition western African lands, at least a further 20 years were needed to establish colonial regimes that were effective throughout all the vast territories claimed by Europe and that were accepted by all the Africans involved. The first problem was a military one.

Small and mobile columns of African soldiers, led and trained by European officers and noncommissioned officers and equipped with precision rifles, machine guns, and artillery, rarely experienced much difficulty in defeating the great empires created by the 19th-century jihadists. These chose to meet the invaders in pitched battles in which their massed feudal levies, with few modern weapons and limited skill in their use, served only as targets for the superior firepower and discipline of their opponents. Once these battles had been lost, the surviving leaders were usually ready to acknowledge the Europeans as new overlords. The main problems were really ones of distance and logistics. Thus it was not until 1900–03 that Sir Frederick Lugard’s forces were sufficiently established in northern Nigeria to defeat the Sokoto Fulani, while the French “pacification” of the even more remote territory further north, which eventually became their colony of Niger, was not really completed until the 1920s.

A much more serious military problem was often presented by smaller political units, which were ethnically more homogeneous and often more densely populated than the jihad empires. Their subjugation was often a protracted business in which the Europeans had to fight virtually for each settlement. This was the case with the British campaign against Asante in 1900–01, with the subjugation of the Sierra Leone protectorate in 1898–99, and above all, perhaps, with the advance of British power into the densely populated Igbo and Tiv territories, which was hardly complete until as late as 1918. Similarly, the most formidable resistance faced by the French came not from the Tukolor, but from the more southerly empire established from the 1860s onward from the hinterland of Sierra Leone to western Gonja by the Mande leader Samory Touré. Though Samory was a Muslim whose activities did much to consolidate the hold of Islam in his territories, he was not a cleric like Usman dan Fodio or al-Ḥājj ʿUmar. He came from a family of Dyula traders and soldiers, and the principles of his government recalled those of ancient Mali rather than of the jihad empires. Samory established his network of military and political control over territories long subject to Mande commercial penetration and settlement, and a number of campaigns had to be fought against him until he was finally captured and exiled by the French in 1898.

Once the superior firepower and organization of the Europeans had secured their military supremacy, they were faced with an even larger problem; namely, how the small forces they commanded were to maintain a permanent occupation and effective control over the vast territories they had overrun. Lugard, for instance, had conquered the Sokoto empire with only about 3,000 soldiers, only 150 of whom were Europeans, and to administer his northern Nigerian colony of some 250,000 square miles and 10 million people he had a civil establishment of only 200 Europeans. This kind of situation persisted almost throughout the colonial period. At the end of the 1930s, for example, the European establishment available to the British governor of the Gold Coast to control nearly four million people was only 842. It is obvious, then, that the conquerors were often very slow to extend effective rule throughout their empires, and particularly to those parts of them that were most remote, presented serious political problems, or seemed least profitable.

Initial difficulty of European administration

No European control could be exercised without the cooperation of large numbers of Africans. This was secured in two ways. First, just as the Europeans had relied on Africans for the rank and file of their armies and police, so their administrations and economic enterprises could not function without a host of Africans employed as clerks, messengers, craftsmen of all kinds, and labourers. All of this employment offered new opportunities to Africans, and to ensure an efficient labour force all European administrations began to supplement and develop the schools begun by the missionaries.

As well as recruiting and training large numbers of Africans as auxiliaries in all spheres of European activity, the colonial powers also came to rely on African chiefs as essential intermediaries in the chain of authority between the colonial governments and their subjects at large. Both the French and the British colonial regimes were essentially hierarchical. The administration of each colony was entrusted to a governor who was responsible to a colonial minister in the government in Europe (in the French case, via a governor-general at Dakar). These governors were assisted by senior officials and a secretariat in the colonial capital, and their decisions and orders were transmitted for implementation to provincial and district commissioners. A district officer, however, could not deal directly with each of the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of Africans in his care. He therefore gave orders either to the traditional chiefs or to Africans who had been recognized as local rulers by his government, and these intermediaries passed them on to the people at large.

In this connection a difference of theory began to be discernible between French and British policy. The French regarded the local African chiefs as the lowest elements in a single administrative machine. This administration was to be conducted on entirely French lines. The British, on the other hand, came to believe more and more in “indirect rule.” British authority was not to reach directly down to each individual African subject. While the British retained overall control of a colony’s administration, it was to be made effective at the district level by cultivating and by molding the governments of the traditional African rulers.

Indirect rule was neither a new nor a specifically British expedient. Maclean had been an indirect ruler on the Gold Coast in the 1830s; Goldie had proposed indirect rule for the empire his Royal Niger Company had hoped to conquer; and, in the early days of their expansion, the French had often had no alternative but to seek to control their newly won territories through the agency of the African governments they had conquered. Once they were firmly established, however, the French almost invariably moved away from the practice. The British, on the other hand, evolved a theory of indirect rule that they tried to apply systematically to their colonies during the first half of the 20th century. This was largely due to the influence of Lugard. In 1900–06 he had seen no other way to control the vast population in northern Nigeria, whose rulers he had defeated, and he had subsequently been promoted governor-general (1912–19) of a united Nigeria, which was by far the most important British colony in Africa. After his retirement to Britain, he became a dominating influence on the formation of colonial administrative policy, so that indirect rule became accepted as the ideal philosophy of government for British tropical Africa.

Not all areas of western Africa were as suitable for Lugardian indirect rule as northern Nigeria. Lugard himself experienced considerable problems in trying to apply it to the largely chiefless societies of eastern Nigeria and to the Yoruba of the southwest, where authority and law were not as clear-cut. In the Gold Coast indirect rule proved more acceptable to the Asante than the direct rule imposed after the conquest of 1900–01. Farther south, however, the Western-style economy and modes of thought had made such inroads that there were endless problems in the implementation of indirect rule, and the full constitutional apparatus for it was hardly installed until the 1940s.

The development of indirect rule also implied a contradiction with an earlier tradition of British colonial government, that of the colonial legislative council. The governors of British colonies were allowed more initiative than French governors and were supposed to exercise this in the interests of their individual territories insofar as these did not contradict the overriding British interest. To help them in this, each colony was equipped with a legislative council that included representatives of local opinion, and this council’s consent was normally required before laws were enacted or the colonial government’s budget was approved.

The institution of the legislative council had evolved from experience with settler colonies outside Africa; when such councils were introduced into tropical Africa from the 1840s onward, most of their members were colonial officials. A minority of “unofficial” members represented trade and the professions rather than the traditional communities, and these were not elected but were nominated by the governor. However, 19th-century colonial officials, traders, and professionals were almost as likely to be black as white, and the early legislative councils were by no means ineffective vehicles for the expression of African interests and of criticisms of British policy. It was thus possible both for the British and for the educated African elite in their colonies to view the legislative councils as embryo parliaments that would eventually become composed of elected African members who would control the executive governments, which would themselves, through the growth of education in the colonies, become more and more composed of African officials.

Although very little thought was given to the matter, because it was supposed that the development might take centuries, it was supposed that the British colonies in Africa would follow the example of Canada and Australia and ultimately emerge as self-governing members of the empire. The equally remote future for the French colonies, on the other hand, was thought to be the acculturation (assimilation) of their people, so that ultimately they would all become full French citizens, the colonies would be integrated with metropolitan France, and the African citizens would share equally with the French-born in its institutions.

Both of these ideals were more appropriate to the colonial situations in western Africa before the great scramble for territory that began in 1879, when the colonies were comparatively small territories in which European influence had been slowly but steadily gaining ground for a considerable period. They were effectively shelved when it came to grappling with the problem of governing the enormously greater numbers of Africans without any real previous contacts with European ways who were quickly brought under colonial rule in the years after 1879. Thus, on the French side, though those born in the four major communes (Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque, and Dakar) of the old colony of Senegal continued to enjoy the French citizenship that they had been granted prior to 1879, other Africans became French subjects (possessing the obligations of citizens but not their rights), who could only qualify for citizenship after stringent tests. By 1937, out of an estimated 15 million people under French rule in western Africa, only some 80,500 were citizens, and only 2,500 of these had acquired their citizenship by means other than the accident of birth in one of the four communes.

In the British colonies, however, where the legislative councils were already a reality, there was a dichotomy between them and the institution of indirect rule. Initially, insofar as this was resolved at all, it was at the expense of the development of the legislative councils. Thus the competence of the council in the Gold Coast was not extended to Asante before 1946, while in Nigeria until 1922 the council’s competence was restricted to the small territory of Lagos. It was not until 1922 that any elected members appeared in the councils, and they remained for a generation a small proportion of the total unofficial membership, chosen only by tiny electorates in a few coastal towns. For the rest, the African population remained firmly under British control through the mechanism of indirect rule. The implication was not only that the norms of African society and political behaviour were far removed from those of western Europe but also that the British had by no means accepted that African society and politics would or should evolve in that direction. Those few Africans who had become educated and acculturated in Western ways were not thought to be representative of the mass. There was a move to exclude local Africans from the colonial administration, which became regarded as a professional service, liable to serve anywhere in Africa, with the role of holding the ring until, in some unexplained fashion, the native administrations under indirect rule had developed sufficiently to make British control superfluous.

Colonial rule

In fact, of course, the very existence of colonial rule meant that the fabric of African societies was exposed to alien forces of change of an intensity and on a scale unparalleled in the previous history of western Africa. Hitherto remote territories like Niger and Mauritania, where there had been very little change since the introduction of Islam, were from about 1900 suddenly caught up in the same tide of aggressive material changes that had for some time been affecting the coastal societies in Senegal or in the southern Gold Coast and Nigeria. From the African point of view, there was little to choose between the European colonial powers. Portugal, despite the fact that it was virtually bankrupt at the onset of the colonial period, was as significant a bringer of change as France, Germany, and Britain. In fact, in the long run, a strange combination of its poverty with memories of its older colonial tradition were to make Portugal’s sense of a mission civilisatrice even more pervasive than that of its stronger rivals.

Liberia’s formal status as an independent republic did not mean that the forces of change associated with the colonial period were excluded from its territory. Its African American ruling elite were orphaned members of a very rapidly changing Western society, who felt it essential to impose its ethos on black Africa. While colonial administrators often had a narrow, 19th-century concept of government as an arbiter, rather than as an active protagonist of change, the Liberians felt a need actively to enlist the support of Western capital and enterprise if they were to consolidate their rule over African peoples and to maintain the independence of their republic.

Up to 1912 the inexperience and relative weakness of Liberia’s ruling elite meant that it achieved little except to run up a dangerous indebtedness to ingenuous and potentially rapacious European investors. In 1925–26, however, the tide began to turn for them when the American Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, worried lest its supplies of raw material should become a British colonial monopoly, secured a new American loan for Liberia and began to operate a one-million-acre plantation concession in the hinterland of Monrovia. The country was now supplied with a sure access to world trade, and its government with the means to achieve a stable revenue. Within 25 years Liberia’s foreign trade grew from less than $3 million a year to some $45 million, and government revenue from a mere $500,000 a year to nearly $10 million. The evident dangers that Liberia might become too dependent on a single export crop, and that it and its administration might become sole fiefs of the American company, began to disappear when during World War II U.S. strategic interests caused its government to begin to give aid to Liberia and to develop its first modern port, and when in the 1950s both American and European interests began to exploit Liberia’s large-scale deposits of high-grade iron ore. By the 1960s Liberia was on the way to becoming one of the richer western African countries, and the ruling elite began to feel sufficiently secure to share both some of its political power and some of its prosperity with the native peoples.

A cardinal rule for all colonial administrations in Africa before the 1930s was that colonies ought not to be a financial burden on the metropolitan governments and their taxpayers: the cost of colonial administration and development should be covered by the local revenues they could raise. So long as such a doctrine was maintained, it was impossible for any but the richest colonial administrations to devise coherent plans for the economic development of their territories; indeed, prior to the 1940s, the colonial government of the Gold Coast was virtually unique in putting forward such a plan, and then only in the 1920s, which were by and large exceptionally prosperous years.

The principal sources of revenue were (1) duties on the trade entering and leaving the territory and (2) direct taxation (usually a poll tax or hut tax). But only those coastal colonies that had already entered the world economy prior to about 1880 had much in the way of trade on which customs duties might be levied or a sufficient internal production of commodities and circulation of money to produce any significant income from direct taxation. Other territories—such as British northern Nigeria, or the French colonies of the Sudan (Mali) and Niger—could not really provide enough revenue to support even the most essential administrative services, such as policing or—for that matter—tax gathering. For some time, therefore, these administrations were in receipt of grants-in-aid from some central source, and it was an attempt to shift this burden from metropolitan resources that as much as anything led the French in 1895 to bring together their western African colonies under a government general and that led Lugard to argue for the unification of the Nigerian colonies, which he eventually achieved in 1912–14. In each case it seemed advisable to use some of the comparatively buoyant revenues of the coastal territories to subsidize the administrations of those in the interior.

It was obvious enough that what was needed was to increase the European commercial penetration of western Africa. But only the prospect of the most lucrative prizes could induce private European investors to place substantial amounts of capital in Africa in advance of adequate European administrations that could guarantee the safety and security of their investments and in advance of the economic infrastructures that would ensure their efficient deployment. The only lure that really operated to attract European investment in advance of the provision of such services was the prospect of rich mineral deposits. The greater part of western Africa’s mineral wealth lies in ores such as those of iron, aluminum, and manganese, which are extremely bulky in relation to their value and require very large investments in transport and other facilities before they can be economically worked, and for which there was relatively little overseas demand before the 1930s. The possibilities of diamond mining in Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast were not really recognized until the 1930s. In effect then, it was only the gold of the Gold Coast and Asante forests and, to a lesser extent, the tin of the Bauchi plateau in central Nigeria, that attracted the early attention of European investors.

Modern methods of gold mining first began to be employed on the Gold Coast as early as 1878, but the industry could not make much headway before 1902. By that time the colonial government had taken the decisive steps of defeating Asante, beginning to build a railway system, and establishing an effective civil administration in the relevant areas, which could ensure proper land surveys and some means of controlling and adjudicating disputes over the ownership of land and the validity of concessions of it. Bauchi tin mining began much later, in 1903, but similar, if less acute, difficulties prevented much progress before 1914.

Despite their poverty, and despite the risk of saddling the home governments and taxpayers with unwanted expenditure, colonial governments found that there was no alternative to their providing the basic infrastructures needed by the vast territories they claimed to rule. It was impossible to wait for private European enterprise to provide railways, harbours, telegraph lines, roads, medical services, schools, and all the other things that were needed to support an effective government, let alone to provide some possibility of economic growth sufficient to pay for better government.

French territories

The problems facing the French were much more formidable than those facing the British. The British colonies were essentially based on territories close to the sea, in which European trade had been long established and whose African peoples were already accustomed to producing for the world market. The French had such a colony in Senegal, but from this they had expanded over vast, remote, and thinly populated territories that required very considerable investment before they could be efficiently administered or developed. By and large the French public had appreciably less capital to invest overseas than the British public had. By 1936 it was estimated that, whereas the British colonies in western Africa had attracted about $560 million of capital, the total outside investment in French West Africa amounted only to some $155 million.

French strategy was initially to open up and develop its western African empire from a base in Senegal on the same Sénégal–Niger river axis along which it had been conquered. As early as 1882 work was begun on a railway to link the heads of navigation of the two rivers at Kayes and at Bamako (which became the capital of the French Sudan). But this line was not completed until 1906, by which time it had become evident that Saint-Louis, at the mouth of the Sénégal River, was not capable of development into a modern port, and that the Sénégal was really suitable for navigation for only three months in the year. So first a railway was completed from Saint-Louis to the new harbour of Dakar in the lee of Cape Verde (1885), and then during 1907–24 a line was built directly from Dakar (since 1902 the federal capital for French West Africa) to Kayes to bypass the Sénégal River altogether.

The construction of an effective west–east transport system from the coast to the upper Niger thus took some 42 years to complete, and the only part of it that was profitable was that serving the peanut-growing areas of Senegal. There was a lag of some 20 years after 1924 before the thinly populated and impoverished French Sudan could respond to the stimulus of its improved communications with the outside world. Indeed the only major crop developed for the world market that could withstand the high costs of transport to the coast—over some 700 miles of railway—was cotton, and that only after considerable further investment in irrigation. Ultimately the main economic role of the Sudan was to provide foodstuffs for Senegal, whose peasant farmers found it more profitable to concentrate on growing peanuts for export.

By 1914 French economic strategy had shifted from the concept of opening up the inland territories of the French Sudan, Upper Volta, and Niger, to the encouragement of agricultural production in the coastal colonies. To a limited extent, the way was pioneered by European plantations, more especially perhaps in the Ivory Coast. Generally these colonies were made remunerative by administrative pressures to induce African farmers to produce for export. Ultimately, just as the economy of the Senegal had become largely dependent on the export of peanuts, so that of French Guinea became dependent on bananas (though at the very end of the colonial period, European and American capital began the successful exploitation of considerable deposits of bauxite and iron ore), and the economies of Dahomey and of Togo (after its conquest from Germany) became dependent on palm produce. The most dramatic successes were achieved in the Ivory Coast, where considerable exports were developed of coffee, cocoa, bananas, and lumber. Railways were built from suitable points on the coast to facilitate the export of these crops.

In the 45 years from 1912–13 to 1956–57, the French had boosted the foreign trade of their western African empire from about $58 million a year to about $600 million a year, with the result that the revenues available to their colonial administrations increased from about $8.5 million a year to as much as $315 million. (These figures exclude the part of Togo that was incorporated in the French empire only after 1914–18, and the trade and revenue of which by the mid-1950s were worth some $24 million and $4 million a year respectively.) In absolute terms in relation to the total population, which in the same period is thought to have doubled to an estimated 19 million, the results were not so spectacular; in 1956–57 foreign trade per capita overall amounted to about $32 and government revenue to about $17. The significance of the figures is also obscured by the federal system to which all the colonies except Togo were subject and which was deliberately used to enable the richer colonies to help the poorer. The trade and revenue figures cannot be easily broken down between the individual colonies. Whereas the estimated gross national products (GNPs) for Senegal and the Ivory Coast were in the order of $180 and $160 per capita respectively (the former considerably inflated by the colony’s possession of the federal capital), only Togo (about $73) and French Guinea and Sudan (about $58 and $53, respectively) were thought to have GNPs per capita higher than $40.

British territories

Each of the four British colonies must necessarily be treated as an independent unit, as each was so treated in British policy. The Gambia was merely a strip of land, averaging only seven miles in width, on either side of 292 miles of navigable waterway penetrating into what otherwise was French Senegal. Even in the 1950s its population did not exceed 300,000, and the possibilities for any sort of development were limited. In fact the colony achieved a fair degree of prosperity by concentrating on the production of peanuts, grown in part by farmers who migrated annually from Senegal for the purpose. By 1956–57 foreign trade was some $60 per capita and government revenue $14.

The Sierra Leone situation was one of a relatively dense population exploiting or even overexploiting a poor environment for its subsistence, and initially the most that was achieved was to develop some palm produce for export. During the 1930s the situation began to change when European companies began to exploit extensive diamond-bearing gravels and to mine high-grade iron ore. By the mid-1950s foreign trade, which had been $14 million ($9 per capita) in 1913–14, had risen to $101 million ($44). About half of this was based on the activities of the foreign-owned mining companies. These provided little local employment; and furthermore, large numbers of people had been led to abandon farming to dig for diamonds on their own account. This gave rise to numerous social, economic, and political problems, because legally the diamond-bearing grounds had been conceded to the European companies. These factors may explain why the increase in government revenue, and hence the capacity of the government to sponsor further development, was low in comparison with other western African territories. It rose from $3.6 million ($2.40 per capita) in 1913–14 to $27 million ($11.70) in 1956–57, a factor of increase of 4.9, which compares unfavourably with a factor of 21.1 for French West Africa as a whole, 11.4 for the Gold Coast, 6.1 for Nigeria, or even 5.9 for the Gambia.

The Gold Coast was a complete contrast, indeed one of the most successful examples of colonial development anywhere in British tropical Africa. The people of its coastlands were long accustomed to world trade, and indeed to British rule, with the result that the Gold Coast entered the colonial period with a very high level of economic activity. In 1912–13 its foreign trade was worth $42.5 million ($28.30 per capita) while government revenue was $6.5 million ($4.30 per capita). Subsequent development was facilitated by the possession, within a manageable area that was adequately but not too densely populated, of a considerable variety of resources.

The first railway was built inland from Sekondi in the southeastern Gold Coast between 1898 and 1903 with the dual purpose of supporting gold mining and ensuring political control of Asante. This railway subsequently was used for the removal of manganese ore and bauxite. Extensive diamond diggings, worked equally by individual Africans and by European companies, began to be developed from 1919 onward. But the mainstay of the economy became cocoa, which local farmers began to produce on small plots in the forest toward the end of the 19th century. They found a reliable market for their produce. Cocoa became the most valuable export when it outranked gold in 1913, and thereafter went on to contribute more than four-fifths of exports and to constitute something between a third and a half of the world’s supply.

The prosperity derived from cocoa in the 1920s enabled the governor, Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg, to pledge the country’s revenues for loans to finance a coherent program of economic and social development. The Gold Coast’s first deep-water port was built at Takoradi, the cocoa-producing forestlands were equipped with a comprehensive railway and road system, and the foundations were laid for educational and medical services as good as any in tropical Africa. Subsequent development was severely checked by the Great Depression of the 1930s and by events of World War II, but by the mid-1950s the postwar demand for tropical produce generated trade for the Gold Coast, estimated to have fewer than five million people, of about $500 million a year, not far short of that generated by all the 19 million people living in French West Africa. Government revenue reached the high level of $27.50 per person, by far the highest in western Africa, while the GNP of about $200 per person was probably higher than that of any tropical African country.

Nigeria provides yet another contrast. The people of its southern territories, like those of the southern Gold Coast or of Senegal, had long been in touch with the world economy. In 1912–13 the country’s trade, at some $65 million a year, was 50 percent higher than the Gold Coast’s and greater even than the combined total for the eight French colonies, including Senegal. But Nigeria was a giant territory, three times as large as the other three British colonies put together, and though compared with the French federation it was relatively small and compact (373,000 square miles), it had the same problem of extending over a considerable area of the remote western Sudan. This could not be ignored—as the much smaller northern Gold Coast or such northern French colonies as Niger were effectively ignored—because the Nigerian Sudan contained more than half the country’s enormous population. By the mid-1950s the Nigerian population was more than 32 million, more than half that of western Africa.

Two things were clearly needed: first, to develop a transport system to make it possible to control and open up the populous north; and, second, to use some of the wealth generated from the growth of foreign trade in the south to stimulate development in the north. No coherent policy was possible, however, before the amalgamation of the separate colonial administrations, which was achieved under Lugard in 1912–14. Initially, even railway building tended to provoke disunion. The first line was built inland from Lagos in 1898–1901 to open up Yorubaland. Before this line was extended to the north across the Niger, the northern government had begun its own railway, from the highest point of navigation on the river, through its new administrative capital of Kaduna, to Kano. In 1912 this was intercepted by an extension of the Lagos line, and subsequently branches were built to areas active in tin mining and the cultivation of peanuts. Finally, another line was built from a new eastern port, Port Harcourt, to the coal mines around Enugu (1916), and this was subsequently extended to Kaduna (1927). By the 1930s Nigeria had 1,900 miles of railway, nearly as many as those possessed by all the French territories together (2,160 miles) but built at nearly twice the cost.

While southern Nigerian development, based essentially on cocoa production in the west and processing of palm oil and kernels in the east, followed much the same pattern as that of the southern Gold Coast, and with essentially similar social consequences, the development of peanuts as the prime export crop of the north did not produce comparable results for its appreciably larger population. By the mid-1950s the trade of Nigeria, at some $800 million a year, was still greater than that of all French West Africa in total, but it was appreciably less per capita, $25.30 compared with $32.20, and the annual revenue available to government, at $173 million, was small in proportion to the total population, only about $5.50 per capita. Inevitably a serious gap had developed between the economic and social progress of the south and that of the north.

Decolonization and the regaining of independence

The end of the colonial period and the establishment during 1957–76 of all the former colonies as independent states was attributable both to a change in European attitudes toward Africa and the possession of colonies and to an African reaction to colonial rule born of the economic and social changes it had produced.

Europeans had colonized western Africa in the later 19th and early 20th centuries confident that their civilization was immensely superior to anything Africa had produced or could produce. Yet hardly had their colonies been established than these convictions began to be challenged. World War I, and the immense misery and loss of life it caused, led some Europeans to doubt whether nations who could so brutally mismanage their own affairs had any moral right to dictate to other peoples. Some reflection of this view was seen in the League of Nations and the system of mandates applied to the former German colonies. Although in western Africa these were entrusted to either French or British administration, the mandated territories did not become the absolute possessions of the conquerors, and the role of the new rulers was declared to be to equip the mandated territories and their peoples for self-government.

A second shock to European self-confidence came with the Great Depression of the 1930s, when trade and production shrank and millions of Europeans had no work. It began to be argued that a remedy lay in more active development of the overseas territories controlled by Europe. If more European capital and skills were directed to the colonies, so that they could produce more raw materials for European industry more efficiently, both Europe and the colonies would gain; as the colonies became wealthier through the exploitation of their resources, the people of the colonies would buy more from Europe.

In 1929 Britain had enacted the first Colonial Development Act, providing that small amounts of British government money could be used for colonial economic development, thus breaking the deadlock by which the only colonial governments that could embark on development programs to increase the wealth of their subjects, and to improve their own revenues, were those that already commanded sufficient revenue to pay for the programs or to service the loans the programs required. The idea that the colonies should be actively developed, in the European as much as in the African interest, was broadened during and after World War II. Transport and currency problems made it urgent for Britain and France to exploit strategic raw materials in their colonies. Furthermore, during 1940–44, when France itself was in German hands, it was only from the colonies and with their resources that General Charles de Gaulle and his associates could continue the fight.

The British funding policy, initiated in 1929, of providing the funds needed for colonial development was greatly expanded in the 1940s and extended to social as well as economic plans. After the war the governments of both Britain and France required their colonial administrations to draw up comprehensive development plans and in effect offered to provide the funds for those that could not be funded from local resources.

In view of past history, the need for such plans was probably greater in the French colonies than in the British, and the French West African program for 1946–55 envisaged the investment of $1,108,000,000, compared with programs totaling $549 million for the four British colonies. Virtually all of the financing for the French program came from France itself. But some of the British colonies had built up considerable reserves from the high prices commanded by their produce during the war and immediate postwar years, and they themselves were able to provide much of the money needed. This tended to accentuate already existing disparities. In the extreme case the Gold Coast plan envisaged spending $300 million, only 4 percent of which was British money. This was the same level of expenditure, roughly $60 per capita, as envisaged for French West Africa. Nigeria’s program, with a contribution from Britain of 42 percent, proposed to spend $220 million—only about $7 per capita. The figures for Sierra Leone were $21 million, 45 percent from the United Kingdom, and $10 per capita; and for the tiny Gambia $8 million, 35 percent, and $27 per capita.

The accompanying political changes were more cautious and turned out to be inadequate to accommodate African aspirations—which had been derived from social changes occasioned during the classical period of colonial rule and further whetted by the policies of active economic development. On the British side, during 1945–48 the legislative councils were reformed so that African representatives outnumbered the European officials. Many of these African members, however, were still government nominees, and, because of the British attachment to indirect rule, those who were elected were mainly representative of the traditional chiefs.

Political advance for the French colonies was naturally seen in terms of increased African participation in French political life. In 1944 it was proposed that the colonies become overseas territories of France. Delegates from the colonies in fact participated in the making of the new postwar French constitution, but this was subject to referenda in which metropolitan French votes predominated. The constitution eventually adopted in 1946 was less liberal to Africans than they had been led to expect.

The emergence of African leaders

By the later 1940s, however, there were appreciable numbers of Africans in both the French and the British colonies who had emerged from traditional society through the new opportunities for economic advancement and education. In coastal areas Christian missionaries and their schools had advanced with the European administrations. The colonial governments, requiring African subordinates for their system, commonly aided and developed the elementary and vocational education initiated by the Christian missions and often themselves provided some sort of higher education for the chiefly classes whose cooperation they required. If rather little of this education had penetrated to the Sudan by the 1940s, in some coastal areas Africans had become eager to invest some of their increasing wealth in education, which was seen as the key to European strength.

Relatively few Africans started up the French educational ladder—school attendance by the mid-1950s was some 340,000, about 1.7 percent of the total population—but those who did found themselves in a system identical with that in France. In British West Africa schools had got a footing before there was much administration to control them, and their subsequent development was more independent. The British educational system therefore developed into a pyramid with a much broader base than the French one. By the mid-1950s there were more than two million schoolchildren in Nigeria, about 6 percent of the total population and a much higher proportion of the population of the south, in which the schools were concentrated; in the Gold Coast there were nearly 600,000, some 12 percent of the population. Many more people in the British than in the French territories thus got some education, and appreciably more were able to attend universities. In 1948 universities were established in the Gold Coast and Nigeria; by 1960 the former territory had about 4,500 university graduates and the latter more than 5,000. The first French African university was a federal institution at Dakar opened in 1950; by 1960 the total number of graduates in French West Africa was about 1,800.

By the 1940s there was enough education to make European-style political activity possible in all the coastal colonies. Such activity may be traced back to at least the 1890s, when Gold Coast professionals and some chiefs founded the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS) to prevent the wholesale expropriation of African lands by European entrepreneurs or officials. The ARPS went on to campaign against the exclusion of qualified Africans from the colonial administration. Following this, in 1918–20, a National Congress of British West Africa was formed by professionals to press for the development of the legislative councils in all the British colonies into elective assemblies controlling the colonial administrations.

In French West Africa early political activity was concentrated in the four towns of Senegal whose people possessed political rights before 1946. Because the seat of power was very clearly in France, with Senegalese electors sending a deputy to the French National Assembly, the result by the 1930s was the emergence of a Senegalese Socialist party allied to the Socialists in France.

By the late 1940s both the French and the British territories possessed an educated, politicized class, which felt frustrated in its legitimate expectations; it had made no appreciable progress in securing any real participation in the system of political control. In fact, anything approaching effective African participation seemed more remote than ever. Implementation of the development programs led to a noticeable increase in the number of Europeans employed by the colonial regimes and their associated economic enterprises. On the other hand, because many Africans had served with, and received educational and technical training with, the British and French armies, the war had led to a great widening of both African experience and skills. Furthermore, the postwar economic situation was one in which African farmers were receiving high prices for their produce but could find little to spend their money on, and in which the eagerly awaited development plans were slow to mature because European capital goods were in short supply.

The formation of African independence movements

There thus developed a general feeling among the intelligentsia that the colonies were being deliberately exploited by ever more firmly entrenched European political and economic systems and that there had developed a new, wider, and mobilizable public to appeal to for support. In 1946 politicians in French West Africa organized a federation-wide political association, the African Democratic Rally (RDA). The RDA and its members in the French National Assembly aligned themselves with the French Communist Party, the only effective opposition to the governments of the Fourth Republic. The result, during 1948–50, was the virtual suppression of the RDA in Africa by the colonial administrations.

In British West Africa the tensions were greatest in the Gold Coast. In 1947 the established politicians brought in Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied in the United States and Britain and had been active in the Pan-African movement, to organize a nationalist party with mass support. In 1948 European trading houses were boycotted, and some rioting took place in the larger towns. An official inquiry concluded that the underlying problem was political frustration and that African participation in government should be increased until the colony became self-governing. In 1951, therefore, a new constitution was introduced in which the legislative council gave way to an assembly dominated by African elected members, to which African ministers were responsible for the conduct of much government business. By this time Nkrumah had organized his own mass political party, able to win any general election, and during the following years he negotiated with the British a series of concessions that resulted in 1957 in the Gold Coast becoming the independent state of Ghana.

Once the British had accepted the principle of cooperating with nationalist politicians, their other western African colonies began to follow the example set by the Gold Coast. But Nkrumah had been greatly aided by the high price for cocoa in the 1950s (which meant that by 1960 Ghana’s trade was worth $630 million a year and that government revenue, at more than $280 million, was broadly adequate to give the people what they wanted in the way of modernizing programs) and by the comparatively high level and generally wide spread of education in a sizable yet compact territory that was without too serious ethnic divisions. The other colonies were not so well placed.

The small size of The Gambia was the principal factor contributing to the delay of its independence until 1965. Sierra Leone was a densely populated country that was appreciably poorer than Ghana (its GNP per capita, at about $70, being approximately one-third of Ghana’s) and in which there was a wide disparity in levels of education and wealth between the Creoles—the descendants of liberated slaves who lived in and around Freetown—and the rest of the people. When independence was achieved in 1961, these deeply rooted problems had been papered over rather than solved.

Nigeria presented the greatest challenge to British and African policymakers alike. In the south two nationalist parties emerged, the Action Group (AG), supported primarily by the Yoruba of the west, and the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), whose prime support came from the Igbo of the east. These parties expected the whole country quickly to follow the Ghanaian pattern of constitutional change. But any elective central assembly was bound to be dominated by the north, which had some 57 percent of the population and whose economic and social development had lagged far behind. The north’s political leaders—most of whom were conservative Muslim aristocrats closely allied with the British through indirect rule—were not at all eager to see their traditional paramountcy invaded by aggressive and better-educated leaders from the south.

The first political expedient was to convert Nigeria into a federation of three regions. In 1957 this allowed the east and the west to achieve internal self-government without waiting for the north, but it left open the questions of how politics were to be conducted at the centre and how Nigerian independence was to be secured. At this juncture it occurred to the northern leaders that by allying themselves to one of the southern parties they might maintain their local monopoly of power and gain prestige in the country as a whole by asking for its independence. The problem of central politics was thus resolved when the northern leaders entered a coalition federal government with the NCNC, and in 1960 Nigeria became independent.

Meanwhile, in French West Africa the RDA, led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny, broke with the Communist Party. The votes of a small bloc of African deputies in the French National Assembly were of considerable value to the shifting coalitions of non-Communist parties that made up the unstable French governments of the 1950s, and the RDA began to seek to influence these governments to allow greater freedom to the colonies.

By 1956 Houphouët-Boigny’s policy had secured a widening of the colonial franchises and the beginnings of a system by which each colony was on the way to becoming a separate unit in which African ministers would be responsible for some of the conduct of government. The implications of this approach, however, did not meet with the approval of some other African leaders, most notable among them Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal and Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea. Senghor had stood outside the RDA since the days of its alliance with the Communists, which he had thought could only bring disaster. Together with Sékou, who had remained within the RDA, he argued that Houphouët’s policy would split up the western African federation into units that would be too small and poor to resist continued French domination.

In 1958 the French Fourth Republic collapsed and de Gaulle was returned to power. On Sept. 28, 1958, in a referendum, the colonies were offered full internal self-government as fellow members with France of a French Community that would deal with supranational affairs. All of the colonies voted for this scheme except Guinea, where Sékou Touré led the people to vote for complete independence. Senegal and the French Sudan were then emboldened in 1959 to come together in a Federation of Mali and to ask for and to receive complete independence within the community. These two territories separated in the following year, but all the others now asked for independence before negotiating conditions for association with France, and by 1960 all the former French colonies were de jure independent states.

By that time only the excessively conservative regimes of Portugal and Spain sought to maintain the colonial principle in western Africa. Encouraged and aided by independent neighbours, Guinean nationalists took up arms in 1962 and after 10 years of fighting expelled the Portuguese from three-quarters of Portuguese Guinea. In 1974 the strain of this war and of wars in Mozambique and Angola caused the Portuguese people and army to overthrow their dictatorship. Independence was quickly recognized for Guinea-Bissau in 1974 and for the Cape Verde Islands and Sao Tome and Principe in 1975. Spain concluded in 1968 that the best way to preserve its interests in equatorial Africa was to grant independence to its people without preparing them for it. The result was chaos.